"Powerlessness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hearers. Thus I remained unsettled in my mind as it regards the mode of preaching; and it is not surprising that I did not then see the truth concerning this matter, for I did not understand the work of the Spirit, and therefore saw not the powerlessness of human eloquence. Further, I did not keep in mind that if the most illiterate persons in the congregation can comprehend the discourse, the most educated will understand it too; but that the reverse does ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... safeguard morality by teaching in public or private schools what is called 'sex-hygiene' will, I believe, prove a failure. I have very little confidence in the restraining or inspiring value of information, as such. I have seen too much of its powerlessness in medical men and students. No one knows so much of the harm of morphine as the physicians do, yet there are more cases of morphine habit among physicians than among any less informed profession. It is, of course, easy to make young children familiar with the facts ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow
... they have to wipe out a stain. This is, however, only on the supposition that the beaten portion is not too great in proportion to the whole, because otherwise the above feeling is lost in that of powerlessness. ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz
... me. The position of a poor orphan left solitary and friendless in the power of rascals filled me with fear, while my own powerlessness equally distressed me; but Chvabrine, Chvabrine above all, filled me with alarm. Invested with all power by the usurper, and left master in the fort, with the unhappy girl, the object of his hatred, he was capable of anything. What should I do? How could I help her? How deliver her? Only ...
— The Daughter of the Commandant • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... I will tell you how religion first began upon earth, not only in Egypt, but in all lands. Man felt his own powerlessness. Looking at the operations of nature—the course of the heavenly bodies, the issues of birth and life and death—he concluded, and rightly, that there was a God over all things, but this God was too mighty for his imagination ...
— The Cat of Bubastes - A Tale of Ancient Egypt • G. A. Henty
... Of the utter powerlessness of retention with which he promulgated his every thought and feeling,—more especially if at all connected with the subject of self,—without allowing even a pause for the almost instinctive consideration whether by such disclosures he might not be conveying a calumnious impression of himself, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... the facts that impressed me: the unmasked powerlessness of the mother, the cool unconcern of the father, but above all the apathetic ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... did not want to know, did not try to force from his lips; and a relentless impatience seized her at his powerlessness. ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... Quiabislan on the sea-shore, he persuaded his new friends to refuse the payment of tribute to Montezuma. He took advantage of his stay at Zempoalla to exhort these people to embrace Christianity, and he threw down their idols, as he had already done at Cozumel, to prove to them the powerlessness ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... and jubilation; then was Anna Leopoldowna loudly cursed by those who had blessed her on the preceding day; then was the new Empress Elizabeth loudly lauded by those who yesterday had smiled with contempt at her powerlessness. ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... the utter powerlessness of mere preaching to cope with this tyrannical power of the present. Forty thousand pulpits throughout the land this day, will declaim against the vanity of riches, the uncertainty of life, the sin of worldliness—against the gambling spirit of human nature; I ask what impression will ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... nations, wars, in the kind of amusements people plunge into—wrong and coarseness and stupidity. He loved men but hated institutions. Sometimes, he would see it all so clearly that the sense of his own powerlessness would come. He would cry, 'One man can't do anything. A man like me can't be heard—oh, I can't make myself heard! It is as if I were shut in a tomb.' He would only have been happy passing from one great crowd to another— harrowing, pleading, electrifying ...
— Red Fleece • Will Levington Comfort
... however, only increased the feeling of powerlessness against the hated creature whom she so urgently needed; for the tenderness which Charles showed Barbara was so great that it not only filled the marquise with surprise and bitter envy, but also awakened the conviction that it must be a small matter for the singer to obtain ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... "We believe ," said he, "that they are guilty. But we do not know it. They must be transported for the crimes which they have committed, the massacres and the conspiracies already proved against them." The decree was passed. But Napoleon, strong in popularity, became so convinced of the powerlessness and insignificance of these Jacobins, that the decree was never enforced against them. They remained in France. But they were conscious that the eye of the police was upon them. "It is not my own person," said Napoleon, ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott
... in the events of the war, their sympathies were undoubtedly with the people of South Africa. They suffered with and for their friends, and they must frequently have been weighed down by a sense of their powerlessness to alleviate the distress around them, which they were forced to witness; but they were, without exception, men of high integrity, and observed with strict honour the obligations laid upon them by ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt
... Venerated—for whom, even now that so many grief-deadening years have fled, we feel, in this holy hour, as if it were impiety so utterly to have ceased to weep—so seldom to have remembered!—And then, with a powerlessness of sympathy to keep pace with youth's frantic grief, the floods we all wept together—at no long interval—on those pale and placid faces as they lay, most beautiful and most dreadful to behold, in ...
— Christmas - Its Origin, Celebration and Significance as Related in Prose and Verse • Various
... the powerlessness of wealth to give me one crumb of comfort, and remembered Winnie's sermon about wealth, I would look at myself in the mirror above my mantelpiece and smile bitterly at the sight of the hollow cheeks, furrowed brow, and melancholy eyes, and recall her words about her hovering near me ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... sympathy, would dab Pa's eyes with a harsh handkerchief and would rebuke him for his decay. Those were hard moments in the Blanchard home, for the two girls had grown almost manlike in abhorrence of tears, and with this masculine distaste had arisen a corresponding feeling of powerlessness in face of emotion which they could not share. It was as though Pa had become something like an old and beloved dog, unable to speak, pitied and despised, yet claiming by his very dumbness something that they could only give by means of pats and half-bullying ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... numerous, and the notion of a considerable momentary force due to number, make possible in the case of crowds sentiments and acts impossible for the isolated individual. In crowds the foolish, ignorant, and envious persons are freed from the sense of their insignificance and powerlessness, and are possessed instead by the notion of brutal ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... about the future seemed idle; he had come to the end of hopes and fears. Night after night his broken sleep suffered the same dream; he saw Mrs. Hannaford, who stretched her hands to him, and with a face of silent woe seemed to implore his help. Help against Death; and his powerlessness wrung his heart with anguish. Waking, he thought of all the women—beautiful, tender, objects of infinite passion and worship—who even at that moment lay smitten by the great destroyer; the gentle, the loving, racked, disfigured, flung into the horror of the grave. And his ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... ruthlessly destroying the loved and cherished objects that had surrounded him from infancy, Antoinette, crushed by the disasters of this most wretched night, this was the terrible picture that rose before him. To this torture was added the despair caused by a sense of his utter powerlessness. Gladly would he have rushed back to the chateau to die there, struggling with his enemies, but he was prevented by the thought of Antoinette, who was now dependent upon him for protection. He was engrossed in these gloomy thoughts when a strange crackling sound attracted his attention, ...
— Which? - or, Between Two Women • Ernest Daudet
... to blame, was the church to blame, for its powerlessness in these social disputes? Could an abler man with a readier eloquence have ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... irrespective of consequence, the violation of which is followed again by a sense of self-disapprobation, of censure, of blame. In vain will Spinoza tell us that such feelings, incompatible as they are with the theory of powerlessness, are mere mistakes arising out of a false philosophy. They are primary facts of sensation most vivid in minds of most vigorous sensibility; and although they may be extinguished by habitual profligacy, or possibly, perhaps, destroyed ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... merit and the gratification of the desire for pleasure. That king who is acquainted with duties and who is possessed of intelligence should never waste what has been stored. The king should never disregard any wealth for its littleness; he should never disregard foes for their powerlessness; he should, by exercising his own intelligence, examine his own self; he should never repose confidence upon persons destitute of intelligence. Steadiness, cleverness, self-restraint, intelligence, health, patience, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... Such a moment could not but be regarded with anxiety by primitive man so soon as he began to observe and ponder the courses of the great lights across the celestial vault; and having still to learn his own powerlessness in face of the vast cyclic changes of nature, he may have fancied that he could help the sun in his seeming decline—could prop his failing steps and rekindle the sinking flame of the red lamp in his feeble hand. In ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... Sigognac, for it was indeed the lord of the manor who now entered, was a young man of five or six and twenty; though at first sight he seemed much older, because of the deep gravity, even sadness, of his demeanour; the feeling of utter powerlessness which poverty brings having effectually chased away all the natural piety and light-heartedness of youth. Dark circles surrounded his sunken eyes, his cheeks were hollow, his mustache drooped in a sorrowful ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... been the best-loved friend of her best-loved relative,—whether or no he remained lost to all the world under the unknown name of a French Chasseur. And yet it smote her with a certain dull, unanalyzed pain; it gave her a certain emotion of powerlessness and of hopelessness to realize that he would remain all his years through, until an Arab's shot should set him free, under this bondage of renunciation, beneath this yoke of service. She stood silent ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... bitterly my powerlessness to do or say anything useful at the present time.' In such a case the testimony of intimates is weighty, and Sir John Gorst sent in June, 1913, his recollection of words used by Mr. Chamberlain in the autumn of 1886: 'I assure you that, as a man of ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... towards the house. John reproached himself bitterly, but he made no further attempt to screw his courage up to the point of proposing. His disappointment was followed by doubts. Was his powerlessness a sign from God that he was abandoning his true vocation for a false one? and a little shaken, he attempted to interest himself in the re-building of his house; but the project had grown impossible to him, and he felt he could not embrace ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... yet felt none of that superior liberty which connects him with the angels, nature, so far as she is incomprehensible, could not fail to impress him with the insufficiency of his imagination, and again, as far as she is a destructive force, to recall his physical powerlessness. He is forced then to pass timidly towards one, and to turn away with affright from the other. But scarcely has free contemplation assured him against the blind oppression of the forces of nature—scarcely has he recognized amidst ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... of the water on Lake Ontario was obtained too late in the year 1814 to have any decisive effect upon their operations. Combined with their continued powerlessness on Lake Erie, this caused their campaign upon the northern frontier to be throughout defensive in character, as that of the Americans had been offensive. Drummond made no attempt in the winter to repeat the foray into New York of the previous ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 2 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... are now inheriting, this view would have seemed not only not untenable, but even obvious. The emptiness of the things of this life, the incompleteness of even its highest pleasures, and their utter powerlessness to make us really happy, has been, at least for fifteen hundred years, a commonplace, both with saints and sages. The conception that anything in this life could of itself be of any great moment to us, was considered as much a puerility unworthy ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... fishermen, who were used to such things, did not think much of it; but I am glad to have been out on such a night, if only for the magnificent sensation it gives to realize one's own powerlessness and His might. As for the rock, there was something to do to look to one's footing, and cling ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the two robbers availed, and in a minute the unfortunate Liller, his face convulsed in agony, was hanging by one arm four feet from the ground. Our hero had looked on, a silent spectator, while this brutal act progressed, lamenting his powerlessness to prevent it. But when the robbers coolly took their pipes and began to smoke, paying no heed to the agonised moans of the victim, a courageous resolution formed itself in ...
— The Four Canadian Highwaymen • Joseph Edmund Collins
... he is driven to make the admission that, however much people may dispute about individual questions, though volume after volume may be written, and thousands of observations accumulated about the struggle for existence and its insignificance, about the omnipotence or powerlessness of natural selection, natural science itself is moving in a direction which, within certain limits, must find ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... person possessing one idea, which so over-masters him that he is never weary of repeating it. That idea is the polar conception of the grandeur and the littleness of man—the vastness of his range in some respects and directions, and his powerlessness to take a single step in others. In 1868, before the Mathematical and Physical Section of the British Association, then assembled at Norwich, I repeat the same ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... whose judgment the mate seemed disposed to defer, decided upon a treatment, which they proceeded forthwith to act upon. It consisted in the administration of a draught, and the application of a blister; and owing to the absolute insensibility of the skipper and his consequent powerlessness to assist in any way it was a somewhat lengthy job; but they completed it at last, and then ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... Hester leaned against Rachel the yearning of her soul towards her suddenly lit up something which had long lain colossal, but inapprehended, in the depths of her mind. Her paroxysm of despair at her own powerlessness was followed by a lightning flash of self-revelation. She saw, as in a dream, terrible, beautiful, inaccessible, but distinct, where her power lay, of which restless bewildering hints had so often mocked her. She had but to touch ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... spoke to him as though he had been any ordinary person. He saw a scarcely perceptible smile on his son's handsome features,—he saw that Von Glauben's eyes twinkled, despite his carefully preserved seriousness of demeanour, and he realized the almost absurd powerlessness of his authority in such an embarrassing position. The assumption of a mute contempt, such as was vaguely expressed by the Queen, appeared to him to be the best policy;—he therefore adopted that attitude, ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... Bloods there were frequent sun-dances where many braves were made and much firewater drunk with consequent blood-letting. Red Crow deprecated these occurrences, but confessed his powerlessness to prevent the flow of either firewater or of blood. A private conversation with the Inspector left with the Chief some food for thought, however, and resulted in the cropping of the mane of White Horse, of whose comings and goings ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... were to be wrested from the Republic. The terrible plague of 1576 had carried off Titian. Twelve years after Titian Paul Veronese passed away. Tintoret, born almost at its opening, lingered till the very close of the century to see Venice sinking into powerlessness and infamy and decay. May not the figure of the dead Christ be the old man's protest against a pride in which all true nobleness and effort had ceased to live, and which was hurrying to so ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... famous communication to the Gun Club, the anger of Captain Nicholl reached its maximum. Mixed with it was supreme jealousy and a sentiment of absolute powerlessness. How could he invent anything better than a Columbiad 900 feet long? What armour-plate could ever resist a projectile of 30,000 lbs.? Nicholl was at first crushed by this cannon-ball, then he recovered and ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... for courtiers, abandon the service, and betake themselves with their discontent to their estates. Others, who have not left their domains, brood there in discomfort, idleness, and ennui, their ambition embittered by their powerlessness. In 1789, says the Marquis de Ferrieres, most of them "are so weary of the court and of the ministers, they are almost democrats." At least, "they want to withdraw the government from the ministerial oligarchy in whose hands it is concentrated;" ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... monotonous thing—the property of numbers to recur at certain longer or shorter intervals in a machine containing them—in other words, the blind groping after fractions of a result the whole of which was well known—was one testimony among many of the powerlessness of logic ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... weather," the guide said in the morning—at least that was what Cuthbert judged him to say, for he could speak no word of the man's language. His actions, however, as he looked toward the sky, and shook his head, spoke for themselves, and Cuthbert, feeling his own powerlessness in a situation so novel to him, felt serious misgivings at ...
— The Boy Knight • G.A. Henty
... of it. But of as much as he could face here and now. Another mind that could have commanded some strange insight into the whole of this past, and his power or powerlessness to look it in the face, might have striven to avert its revival. That blow might have been too overwhelming. But there was enough, as we shall see, in the recollection that came back of the decade before his return to England, to make his breath catch and a shudder run through ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... passion. This is the experience of a few weeks. But, alas! Kate, to be able to exercise patience—how hard a thing that is! It requires constant watchfulness and a constant effort. Every hour I find myself betrayed into the utterance of some hasty word, and feel its powerlessness compared to those that ...
— Home Scenes, and Home Influence - A Series of Tales and Sketches • T. S. Arthur
... so shamelessly robbed of her children? For is not my daughter the captive and concubine of an insane tuft-hunter? Has not my son been taken from me through the baseness that has been practised against his sister, and the lamentable spectacle afforded him by my own powerlessness? Where, I ask high Heaven, is there another woman so cursed ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... pay the legacies till the close of the twelvemonth legally allotted for their settlement. Bewildered and indignant, Lily resolved to try the effect of a personal appeal; but she returned from her expedition with a sense of the powerlessness of beauty and charm against the unfeeling processes of the law. It seemed intolerable to live on for another year under the weight of her debt; and in her extremity she decided to turn to Miss Stepney, who still lingered in town, immersed in the delectable duty of "going over" her benefactress's ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... remarkable system depended for its growth on a double bluff or deception. On the one hand the laboring classes accepted from ignorance or powerlessness, or were compelled, persuaded, or cajoled by custom, convention, authority, and the well-established order of Society into accepting, a situation in which they could call their own very little of the cake that they and Nature and ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes
... and white phantoms, palm-trees, lofty pillars, pyramids, porches, and a thousand other illusions, surround us on all sides. One figure, concerning which all agree, is a long-haired goat, the Evil One in that form. But some one has broken the head, perhaps to show the powerlessness of the enchanted guardian of the cave. Some say that there are no living animals here, but there is no doubt that there are bats; and an exploring party, who passed the night here, not only heard the hissing of the rattlesnake, but were startled ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... rivalries had been brought into the open by the Chino-Japanese War of 1894-1895, which showed the powerlessness of China. The western world was, indeed, divided in opinion as to whether this colossus of the East was essentially rotten, old, decrepit, and ready to disintegrate, or was merely weak because of arrested development, which education and training could ...
— The Path of Empire - A Chronicle of the United States as a World Power, Volume - 46 in The Chronicles of America Series • Carl Russell Fish
... literary apprenticeship in two or three coffee-houses, becomes a member of the Society of Men of Letters, attacks, with or without reason, men of talent who don't read his articles, assumes a milder tone on seeing the powerlessness of his criticisms, offers novelettes to the papers which toss them from one to the other as if they were shuttlecocks: and, after five or six years of exercises more or less fatiguing, of dreadful privations which seriously ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Second Part • Honore de Balzac
... for making those promises good through its State branches.... If the Connecticut Republican leaders can play a free hand without interference from the national party, then that party faces the alternative of either admitting powerlessness and disintegration or of being an accomplice in the State's attitude ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various
... only say, "Poor, poor darling!"—but he secretly wondered over the terrible tenacity of this mild creature. There was gathering within him an amazed sense of his powerlessness over Rosamond. His superior knowledge and mental force, instead of being, as he had imagined, a shrine to consult on all occasions, was simply set aside on every practical question. He had regarded Rosamond's cleverness as precisely of the receptive kind ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... oligarchy, he degenerated into violent courses, and ultimately organized, or rather was provoked into organizing, the rebellion of 1837. The grievances which led to this outbreak were genuine and severe, and were all in course of time admitted and redressed. One, the powerlessness of the Assembly, owing to the control by the Executive of annual sums sufficient to pay the official expenses of Government, corresponded to a pre-Union Irish grievance, and was remedied by an Act of 1831. Most of the other ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... how much anguish skulks about the outside of life, so long as it finds no lodgment in the sacred shrines of the heart. Madeline met her first grief and fought it off; and, even while she thought it had given her a mortal wound, came the revelation of the powerlessness of the poor thing. She put her arms down on the window-sill to cry deliberately, but something ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... and the peace of Europe France, it was held, must be reduced to powerlessness. England's greatness at sea might enable her to destroy the enemy's commerce, conquer her colonies, and blockade her ports; the object of the war could be attained only by victories on land. Politically the continental ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... to show the shortsightedness of human sagacity. The lesson was rapidly given; it was proved in European havoc, that utter powerlessness for good was not merely compatible with tremendous power for evil, but was actually the means of accumulating that power; that the more wretched, famishing, and haggard a nation might become at home, the more irresistible it might prove abroad: that, like the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... legislators is admitted to be indefensible. Its theoretic prerogatives are tolerated only on the understanding that they shall never be exerted. It exists by virtue of habit and indifference, aided by a conviction of its powerlessness. As a decorative institution there is no great eagerness to pull it down, but whenever the House forgets that its functions are ornamental, and commits itself to a serious issue with the Commons, its last ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... escaped Stephane, a frightful change came over his face. Three times he tried to rise, and three times the hand of his father weighed him down again, and kept him in a kneeling posture. Then, as if annihilated by the thought of his weakness and powerlessness, he yielded, and covering his eyes with both hands, he murmured these words in ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... justice supervened. If at that moment Samson's powers had been his, he would have snapped the ropes that bound him like packthread, and would have cut the throat of every man around him. When he was placed upon the substitute for a "block," and felt by a motion of his elbows his utter powerlessness, the dogged and indifferent state came on, but it did not last. It could not. His Christian training ...
— In the Track of the Troops • R.M. Ballantyne
... met. Then, with her arm around him, she half forced, half supported him to the port quarter, where his boat was slopping against the side. He wanted to resist; he wanted to cry out and tell her the truth, but a strange, leaden powerlessness benumbed him. He got into the dinghy, drew in the dripping painter she cast after him, and watched her ease the sheet and set the vessel scudding for the passage. With her black hair flying in the wind, her bare arms resting lightly on the wheel, her straight, girlish, supple figure bending with ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... much on account of the actual loss of life produced by the disease as for the agonies of apprehension engendered by the fact of the absolute remorselessness and blindness with which it may strike, and our comparative powerlessness to cure. So far the results have been ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... the troops," said Elizabeth, in her usual tone, not caring whether or not the prisoner should be disturbed,—for in his powerlessness he could not oppose her plans if he did know them, and in her disdain she had no consideration for his feelings. "The troops shall come for him. Black Sam shall go to the watch-house at King's Bridge with word that there's ...
— The Continental Dragoon - A Love Story of Philipse Manor-House in 1778 • Robert Neilson Stephens
... lids hid them from him. It was not yet full day; it was still snowing. Gratton and the men with him would, of course, have ample supplies. She yearned feverishly to be rid of King and his intolerable domineering. She estimated swiftly that, paradoxically, her only power over him was that of powerlessness; while she lay here hers was, in a way, the advantage. On her feet, following him, he would be again to her the brute he had ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... her! Ah, how loathsome the whole cycle of favours were to me, considering from whom they came! Then we had effectually plagued each other. And it was not without loud laughter, as of malice unexpectedly triumphant, that I found one night thirty years after, on regretting my powerlessness of vengeance, that, in fact, I had amply triumphed thirty years before. So, undaunted Mrs. Evans, if you live anywhere within call, listen to the assurance that all accounts are squared between us, and that we balanced our mutual debts by mutual disgust; and ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... all legislating and vetoing, without stint or limit, till pulled up short by a judgment of the Supreme Court. With us factions in the colonies are clamorous and violent, with the hope of producing effect on the Imperial Parliament and Government, just in proportion to their powerlessness at home. The history of Canada during the past year furnishes ample evidence of this truth. Why was there so much violence on the part of the opposition here last summer, particularly against the Governor-General? Because it felt itself to be weak ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... startled the echoes. Masterful voices and confident human laughter filled all the wild inhabitants with wonder and dismay. The undisputed lord of the range was an old silver-tip grizzly, of great size and evil temper. Furious at the unexpected trespass on his sovereignty, yet well aware of his powerlessness against the human creature that could strike from very far off with lightning and thunder, he had made up his mind at once to withdraw to some remoter range. Nevertheless, he had lingered for some days, sullenly expecting he knew ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... indicated utter discouragement, the most bitter suffering, the most horrible despair. His soul was writhing in a body from which life had fled. Intelligence, mind, and will were fast bound in a corpse which they could not electrify. The consciousness of his own powerlessness caused him a paroxysm of frantic rage; his hands clinched, the veins in his throat swelled, his eyes almost started from their sockets, and in a harsh, shrill voice that had nothing human in it, he exclaimed: "Marguerite!—despoiled!—take ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... familiar, too, with bleak rehearsals, hours of listless waiting for his little scenes; with his powerlessness to get into his simple words the particular intonation required by an overdriven producer. Familiar, too, with long and hungry Sunday railway journeys when pious refreshment rooms are shut; with little mean towns like Bludston, where he and three or four of the company ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... always known it would come, but its suddenness paralysed. She had nothing to say. Silently she stood beside him, her hands tight-locked, numbed with a desperate fear. He would go—and he would never return. It hammered in her brain, making her want to shriek. She felt to the full her own powerlessness, nothing she could say would turn him from his purpose. It was the end she had always foreseen, the end of all her dreams, the end of everything but sorrow and pain and loneliness unspeakable. And for him—danger and possibly death. He had admitted risk, he had set his house in order. ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... face for quite a considerable distance along the main deck. Thereupon followed various and unpleasant consequences of a physical order—"queer symptoms," as the captain, who treated them, used to say; inexplicable periods of powerlessness, sudden accesses of mysterious pain; and the patient agreed fully with the regretful mutters of his very attentive captain wishing that it had been a straightforward broken leg. Even the Dutch doctor who took the case up in Samarang ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... and the other more immediately tempting. We have a sense of obligation irrespective of consequence, the violation of which is followed again by a sense of self-disapprobation, of censure, of blame. In vain will Spinoza tell us that such feelings, incompatible as they are with the theory of powerlessness, are mistakes arising out of a false philosophy. They are primary facts of sensation most vivid in minds of most vigorous sensibility; and although they may be extinguished by habitual profligacy, or possibly, ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... companion's lips. He saw how the muscles of his face contracted with the effort to express his thoughts, and he felt that behind this bombast there was a great, serious grief. There was something intensely pathetic in the powerlessness of this strong and savage youth, who suddenly started to pace the sidewalk with big, uneven steps. Skipping along after him with his short legs, Ookhtishchev felt it his duty somehow to calm Foma. Everything Foma had said and done that evening awakened in the jolly secretary a ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... all the clear-cut arguments of my intellect, the most fervent tirades and speeches, the sincerest tears of compassion and outcries of indignation unfailingly broke against a dull, unresponsive wall. But all powerlessness, if it is unable to prevent a crime, becomes complicity; and this was the result: personally guiltless of any offence against my brother, I have become in the eyes of all those unconcerned and those of my brother ...
— The Shield • Various
... would have treated any other woman so, but not Vera. Then the conviction gnawed at his heart that for the sake of the woman who was now escaping him he was neglecting his "mission." His pride suffered unspeakably by the confession of his own powerlessness. He admitted that the beautiful statue filled with the breath of life had character; she acted in accordance with her own proud will, not by the influence of outside suggestion. His new conception of truth did not subdue ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov
... officers, by controlling in some strange way the minds of those men; but against a storm, or the course of inanimate nature in any other direction, they were as powerless as any other people, and their sense of powerlessness was paralyzing to them. On the other hand, Pym and Peters had sprung from races that had in the past thousand years gone through hundreds of struggles, amid every kind of danger, for existence; ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... never forget how our hearts sank when in 1871 that decision came, declaring the powerlessness of the Federal Constitution to protect women in their civil right of being eligible to the legal profession. When we said if these rights which it is meant to protect are not civil they must be political rights, we thought we had the Supreme Court ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... never! Her fright and nervousness vanished; and she began her recitation, her clear, sweet voice reaching to the farthest corner of the room without a tremor or a break. Self-possession was fully restored to her, and in the reaction from that horrible moment of powerlessness she recited as she had never done before. When she finished there were bursts of honest applause. Anne, stepping back to her seat, blushing with shyness and delight, found her hand vigorously clasped and shaken by the stout ...
— Anne Of Green Gables • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Harmony Jail had known these two faithful servants to be honest and true. While he raged at them and reviled them for opposing him with the speech of the honest and true, it had scratched his stony heart, and he had perceived the powerlessness of all his wealth to buy them if he had addressed himself to the attempt. So, even while he was their griping taskmaster and never gave them a good word, he had written their names down in his will. So, even while it was his daily declaration that he mistrusted all mankind—and ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... the air, the grunting and puffing of the engine—poor, tortured thing, hammered by at least a dozen shells, any one of which, by penetrating the boiler, might have made an end of all—the expectation of destruction as a matter of course, the realization of powerlessness—all this for seventy minutes by the clock, with only four inches of twisted iron between danger, captivity, and shame on one side—and freedom ...
— Real Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... a foreign court, the imprisonment of Scotchmen in foreign prisons, were steps that showed the powerlessness of James to grasp the first principles of law; but they were effective for the purpose at which he aimed. They struck terror into the Scotch ministers. Their one weapon lay in the enthusiasm of the ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... of the change this letter would work in his prospects, and his own complete powerlessness to prevent it, the gloom and perplexity on his face deepened. He had been congratulating himself on the removal of this particular man as a providential arrangement made with some regard to his own convenience. And to see him ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... difficulty was that the state of the public finances was in no condition to undertake costly schemes of betterment. In a later chapter we shall see the Government, after exhausting the resources of loans, looking to a desperate remedy to conquer its powerlessness for enterprise. ...
— The Story of Newfoundland • Frederick Edwin Smith, Earl of Birkenhead
... heaped upon her by "The Dunciad" injured her prospects cannot be doubted. She was far from being a "signal illustration of the powerlessness of this attack upon the immediate fortunes of those assailed," as Professor Lounsbury describes her.[16] It is true that she continued to write, though with less frequency than before, and that some of her best-sellers were produced at a time when ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... populace on the scaffold," said the Abbe Dutheil. "The great scandal and horror his conduct will excite may hide our defeat and powerlessness. In fact, as I have just been saying to Monsieur de Grancour, this very spectacle may drive other sinners into the arms of ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... ministrations to the spirit that heeded them not. Only once his sister had observed a slight moisture rise for a moment in his eye, as she touched some tender traits of the character of the departed; but it passed away rather as an evidence of the utter powerlessness of nature, in a faint heave of the reactive energy, telling at once how little she could perform, yet how much was necessary to overcome the weight by which she was oppressed. I sat for some moments silent by the side of the bed, and meditated a recourse to some more ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... Ezekiel saw the facts of Israel's powerlessness as plainly as the most despondent, he did not therefore despair. The question which rose in his mind was God's question, and the very raising it let a gleam of hope in. So he answered with that noble utterance of faith ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... indignantly. "Do you not see, then, that this is a miserable title by which Fate seems to mock me, and which it thunders constantly, and, as it were, sneeringly into my ears, in order to remind me again and again of my deplorable powerlessness? There is nothing 'imperial' about me but the yoke under which I am groaning; and my 'highness' is to be compared only with the crumbs of Lazarus which fell from the rich man's table. And yet there are persons, Nugent, who envy me these crumbs—men who think it a brilliant ...
— Andreas Hofer • Lousia Muhlbach
... familiar with the powerlessness of even the best verse to make any impression upon Anglo-Saxon opinion, may smile to think of a great moral and ethical attack conducted with no better weapon than a paper of sonnets. But the scene of the fight was a small, intensely local, easily agitated society of persons, ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... the shadow of Tito passed in front of the hovel as he departed homeward, Baldassarre was sitting in that state of after-tremor known to every one who is liable to great outbursts of passion: a state in which physical powerlessness is sometimes accompanied by an exceptional lucidity of thought, as if that disengagement of excited passion had carried away a fire-mist and left clearness behind it. He felt unable to rise and walk away just yet; his limbs seemed benumbed; he was cold, and his ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... that it has ceased to exist in the old meaning of the word and remains only as a philosophy of special scientific branches. Truly, when I come to think of it it seems that the human mind too has its tragedies, and it began by confessing its own powerlessness. As I write a personal diary I will treat these matters from a personal point of view. I am not a professed philosopher, because I am nothing by profession; but as a thinking being I am interested in the new philosophic movement; I have been and am under its influence, and have a full ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... Marat ran through the ranks, encouraging and exciting them. "No weakness," said he; "do not quit your posts till they have given them up." The convention then returned within the house, overwhelmed with a sense of their powerlessness, convinced of the inutility of their efforts, and entirely subdued. The arrest of the proscribed members was no longer opposed. Marat, the true dictator of the assembly, imperiously decided the fate of its members. "Dussaulx," said he, "is an old twaddler, incapable of leading a party; ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet
... past her, not ten feet distant. One rider saw her, for he turned to shout back. This drove Madeline into a panic. Hardly knowing what she did, she began to run away from the house. Her feet seemed leaden. She felt the same horrible powerlessness that sometimes came over her when she dreamed of being pursued. Horses with shouting riders streaked past her in the shrubbery. There was a thunder of hoofs behind her. She turned aside, but the thundering grew nearer. She ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... night-lamp, Selma saw Pauline smiling at her as though in defiance of whatever fate might have in store. Selma herself felt the inclination neither to smile nor to weep. She sat looking before her with her hands clasped, resenting the powerlessness of the few remedies used, and impatient of the inactivity and relentless silence. Why did not the doctor adopt more stringent measures? Surely there was something to be done to enable Wilbur to combat the disease. Dr. Page had the reputation ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... literature, and save a world of trouble, if they were forgotten as soon as they had done so. To illustrate such books, to add to their information or correct their blunders, would be useless and almost ridiculous. They should be left to die of mere powerlessness and exhaustion, or to wither under the wholesome influence of a just ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 2, November 10 1849 • Various
... thought of. She bent down her little head into her hands, and once more shed back that hair which, never relieved out of its braids through all this long night, began to droop over her pale cheeks; and a quick sigh of impatience, of energy restrained, of such powerlessness as her courageous capable soul, in the very excess of its courage and capacity, felt in its approaching conflict with the feeble foolish creature, who never could be stimulated out of her own narrow possibilities, burst from Nettie's breast. But the sigh was as much physical as mental—the ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... Emperor Charles V, [2] which ended with the siege of Rome and the imprisonment of the Pope in the Castle of S. Angelo for some months until he contrived to escape to Orvieto; and meanwhile Florence, realizing his powerlessness, uttered a decree again banishing the Medici family, and in 1527 they were sent forth from the city for the third time. But even now, when the move was so safe, Florence lacked courage to carry it out until a member of the Medici family, furious at the presence of the base-born Medici in the palace, ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... was very conscious of his own situation as far as the uncertainty of his life was concerned, but he had apparently no sense of sinfulness before God. Perhaps the reserve was on my side. I think I never felt so much as in this case the utter powerlessness of human influence to bring the soul to God. He spoke calmly of death; but when I asked him what was the ground of his hope ...
— Gathering Jewels - The Secret of a Beautiful Life: In Memoriam of Mr. & Mrs. James Knowles. Selected from Their Diaries. • James Knowles and Matilda Darroch Knowles
... could not forget the tableau vivant she had witnessed, was continually persecuting her hapless victim with inuendoes and allusions, whose anger and powerlessness to exculpate herself gave an additional zest to the amusement. Therefore, finding this young lady was to remain the evening, Bluebell took refuge in the school-room tea, and did ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... prophesies. This fact for a Christian who has eyes to see, and ears to hear, is particularly noticeable when periodically a tidal wave of bigotry or open persecution strikes the Catholic Church, lashes itself into fury, washes the Rock of Peter with ugly foam . . . and dies away, ashamed of its own powerlessness and unfairness. ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... contemplated Treason, garrulously scolded the North as being to blame for it, and, while praying to God to "preserve the Constitution and the Union throughout all generations," wrung his nerveless hands in despair over his own powerlessness—as he construed the Constitution—to prevent Secession! Before writing his pitifully imbecile Message, President Buchanan had secured from his Attorney-General (Jeremiah S. Black of Pennsylvania) an opinion, in ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... in an agony of powerlessness to help, the balloon slowly regained the perpendicular, and just as Phillip seemed at the point of exhaustion his feet caught once more in the netting, and, with his arms thrust through the meshes and twisted in and out for security, while his strong teeth also gripped ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 26, February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... clergy, and to call an army to his aid; the barons to gather in arms, backed by the excommunication of the Primate. But the strife went no further than words. Ere the Parliament he had convened could meet, Edward had discovered his own powerlessness; Winchelsey offered his mediation; and Edward confirmed the Great Charter and the Charter of Forests as the price of a grant from the clergy and a subsidy from the Commons. With one of those sudden revulsions of feeling of which ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... Frank and Jack stood in deathlike stillness. Both realized the tragedy that was about to be enacted, and both were aware of their powerlessness to avert it. ...
— The Boy Allies Under Two Flags • Ensign Robert L. Drake
... feelings to others, not even to my mother, notwithstanding that she was always in perfect sympathy with me with regard to my love of nature. The reason of my silence was, I think, my powerlessness to convey in words what I felt; but I imagine it would be correct to describe the sensation experienced on those moonlight night among the trees as similar to the feeling a person would have if visited by a supernatural being, if he was perfectly convinced that it was there in ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... it, and shunned anything that brought the least impression of the kind. The only occasion when she would avow her fears even to herself, was when she knelt in prayer; and then how wild and unsubmissive were her petitions! How embittered and wretched she would feel at her own powerlessness! Then the next minute she would drive off her fears as by force; call up a vision of a brightly smiling future; think, speak, and act as if hiding her eyes would prevent the approach ...
— Henrietta's Wish • Charlotte M. Yonge
... his fury came instantly to a head. Rage at his defeat at the hands of the dentist and before Selina's eyes, the hate he still bore his old-time "pal" and the impotent wrath of his own powerlessness were suddenly unleashed. ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... languishing is a model of impassioned argument. The four wounds, be it noted, are the "spirit of falsehood," "the spirit of clerical domination," "the spirit of avarice," and "the spirit of immobility." The Pope replies in a tone of resignation; he does not disguise his powerlessness; he hopes to meet ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... is only a foil to his wife. He is introduced to bring into sharper relief her unhappiness and her powerlessness to better her condition. He is not a bad man, nor is she a bad woman. To say that the story turns entirely on his honor and on her false pride is to miss, I think, the author's purpose. There is nothing distinctive ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... more, so as not to think about myself. But since I have undertaken a book that has absurd difficulties in its execution, the feeling of my powerlessness adds ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... prodigy, capable of grasping half-tones quite beyond the range of the normal ear, and his attempt to cause them to be heard and appreciated by his coarser fellows brought him only criticism and abuse. He realized at times his own powerlessness to convey in words all that he felt, and once said: "On ne saurait rendre en entier ce que sont les personnes; du moins cela ne me serait pas possible; je connais bien mieux celles avec qui je vis, que je ne les definirais; ...
— A Selection from the Comedies of Marivaux • Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux
... as the door closes on her brother. A sense of weakness, of powerlessness oppresses her. She has fought so long, and for what? Is there nothing to be gained; no truth to be defended anywhere, no standard of right and wrong. Are all men—all—base, selfish, cowardly, dishonorable? Her whole being seems aflame with the indignation that is consuming ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... Richard, tremblingly,—for he guessed what that meant, and the idea of Margery being subjected to a long and comfortless imprisonment, was almost more than he could bear. His own utter powerlessness to save her was a bitter draught ...
— Mistress Margery • Emily Sarah Holt
... seems so close that they imagine themselves powerless to elude it. As soon as this idea gives place to that of escape they get out of the way as fast as they can. If their first idea persisted, however, the actual powerlessness resulting from it would likewise persist, and unless the vehicle stopped or turned aside they would ...
— The Practice of Autosuggestion • C. Harry Brooks
... evening's work was over, as she would have done at ordinary times. To counteract the malign spell which she imagined poor Eustacia to be working, the boy's mother busied herself with a ghastly invention of superstition, calculated to bring powerlessness, atrophy, and annihilation on any human being against whom it was directed. It was a practice well known on Egdon at that date, and one that is not quite ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... of its constitution the synod has no power to alter the Prayer-Book. At every session this point is debated afresh, with the only result of throwing up into clearer relief the powerlessness of the synod with regard to it. Another matter which comes up for regular treatment is the admission of women to a vote at parish meetings. The measure has hitherto always been defeated by the vote of the clerical order, but the tide seems now to ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas
... upon this vigorous action gave place, as the day wore on, to a dull heavy pain as our thoughts dwelt upon the fate that Fray Antonio had gone forth to meet, and upon our present powerlessness to defend him in any way against it. Although the envoy had been sent back, and war was now resolutely determined upon, the situation remained unchanged in so far as concerned the necessity of our waiting ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... came to see that even did he bear her such a tale she would not believe it. The infinite assurance of his power, implicit in everything that he had said to her, must now arise in her memory, and give the lie to his present confession of powerlessness. She would not believe him, and disbelieving him, she would seek a motive for the words that she would deem untrue. And that motive she would not find far to seek. She would account his present attitude the consummation ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... meet other beings as vile as herself who would be only too glad to believe her falsehoods. And to think that he was powerless to punish her! He now realized the suffering his mother had spoken of—the most atrocious suffering which the lover can endure—powerlessness to protect the object of his affections, when she is assailed. Engrossed in these gloomy thoughts, Pascal preserved a sullen silence during the repast. He ate because his mother filled his plate; but if he had been questioned, he could scarcely have told what he was eating. And yet, the modest dinner ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... unsuspiciously fallen into the cruel iron jaws of the relentless machine. She sat in that chair by the fire, gazing at the hissing logs as they spat at the flames that licked them, and felt all the powerlessness, all the impotence, that the frightened rabbit knows when it is caught in the device ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... side by side. The old man kept endeavouring to utter words; his powerlessness was dreadful to him, his face showed. But ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... remarkable that this signal recognition by the Fourth General Council of the Roman Pontiff's authority coincided in time with the utter powerlessness to which Rome as a city was reduced. That city, on whose glory as queen of nations and civiliser of the earth her own bishop had dwelt with all the fondness of a Roman, when, year by year, on the least ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... pardon for these antics," he said, adjusting his hat. "A movement of childish petulance! Indeed, I feel very much like a child in my ignorance, in my powerlessness, in my want of resource, in everything except in the dreadful consciousness of some evil hanging ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... their niches or over their tombs in an excess of decadent taste for which the most bigoted agnostic, however Protestant he may be, must generously grieve. It is not conceivably the taste of the church or the faith; it is the taste of the wicked world, now withered and wasted to powerlessness, which overruled both for evil in art from its evil life. The saints and the popes are, aesthetically, lamentable enough; but the allegories in bronze or marble, which are mostly the sixteenth-century notions of the Virtues, are inexpressible—some of these creatures ought really to be put out ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... niggers in this rotten country!" breathed Tryon, at last, and, with the words, expressed all the weight of the white man's burden in Africa, mingled with rage at his present powerlessness to smite the evil-doer. Druro grinned. It was not his funeral, and, to the wise, no further words were necessary. But Mrs. Hading had not been long enough in Africa to be wise. This final calamity seemed all part and parcel of ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... they understood the popular feeling, sympathized with it, shared it. But their powerlessness prevented them from refusing terms which their pride compelled them to resent. They could not entertain seriously thoughts of active resistance, unless the Allies were attacked by the Germans; but how little prospect of this there was has been revealed by a number of messages exchanged at that ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... the Cardinal, strongly moved by the sight of the little helpless twisted figure, and painfully impressed too by the sense of his own entire powerlessness to remove the cause of the trouble, bent down and kissed him—"Believe me, if the giving of my own life could make you strong, you should have that life willingly. May ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... powerlessness of the representative branch of the Legislature has rendered the officers and dependents and partizans of the Executive more and more despotic, overbearing, and reckless of the ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... brain, and thence to the motor nerves. The thread which connected the external object to the motor mechanism of the animal by enveloping the optic nerve, is severed; the visual perception has therefore become powerless, and in this powerlessness consists unconsciousness." This argument is more clever than convincing. It is not convincing, because it consists in exaggerating beyond all reason a very real fact, that of the relation which can be discovered between our sensations and our movements. We believe, with M. Bergson, ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... brocades and Saxony clocks, to the green young panoply of spring. And just as it gives again the age's consciousness of the delicious robe of earth, so, too, it gives again its sense of weariness and powerlessness and oppression. The nineteenth century had been loud with blare and rumors and the vibration of colossal movements, and man had apparently traversed vast distances and explored titanic heights and abysmal depths. And ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... Charlie! You've no use for money! You rely entirely upon your own attractiveness and the kindness of human nature! And so far your confidence has not been misplaced. But your fidelity and affection are only additional proofs of the powerlessness of money. Money bought you, Charlie, no doubt, in the first place—but money failed to keep you! And now, though by your means Mary found me where I lay helpless and unconscious on the hills in the storm, I can neither ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... a great relief to us as letting us know that the brother and sister were under no physical restraint, but our powerlessness and inability even to comprehend what the danger was which threatened those whom we had come to love better than ourselves was little ...
— The Mystery of Cloomber • Arthur Conan Doyle
... theology of St. Augustine in accord with the testimony of the great Apostle. While studying that theology, his conviction of the power of sin and the powerlessness of man's own strength to overcome it, grew more and more decided. But St. Paul taught him to understand that belief somewhat differently to St. Augustine. To Luther it was not merely a recognition of objective truths or historical facts. What he understood by ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin |
