Capacity Quotes - Page 37

• Be understood in thy teaching, and instruct to this measure of capacity; precepts and rules are repulsive to a child, but happy illustration winneth him.

  Martin Farquhar Tupper

  Children, Teaching, Illustration

  4 Copy quote

• God's unique capacity is too surprising to surprise.

  Emily Dickinson

  God, Unique, Surprise

  Emily Dickinson (2012). “Letters of Emily Dickinson”, p.367, Courier Corporation

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Success in business is seldom owing to uncommon talents or original power which is untractable and self-willed, but to the greatest degree of commonplace capacity.

  William Hazlitt

  Business, Self, Owing

  William Hazlitt (2008). “Liber Amoris and Related Writings”, Carcanet Press

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• Were one to ask me in which direction I think man strongest, I should say, his capacity to hate.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Hate, Men, Thinking

  Henry Ward Beecher (1858). “Life Thoughts”, p.248

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Christianity taught the capacity, the element, to love the All-perfect without a stingy bargain for personal happiness. It taught that to love Him was happiness;--to love Him in others' virtues.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Perfect, Elements, Taught

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1883). “Emerson's Complete Works”

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• The weakest being on earth can accomplish feats of strength. The frailest urchin will ring every doorbell on the street in arctic weather or hoist himself aloft to inscribe his name on a virgin monument.

  Honore de Balzac

  Names, Weather, Earth

  4 Copy quote

• Mediocrity is perhaps due not so much to lack of imagination as to lack of faith in the imagination, lack of the capacity for this abandon.

  Denise Levertov

  Imagination, Mediocrity, Abandon

  Denise Levertov (1973). “The poet in the world”, New Directions Publishing Corporation

  15 Copy quote

  Show source

• While every human being has a capacity for love, its realization is one of the most difficult achievements.

  Erich Fromm

  Love, Achievement, Realization

  Erich Fromm (2013). “Man for Himself: An Inquiry Into the Psychology of Ethics”, p.104, Open Road Media

  19 Copy quote

  Show source

• A thousand things to be written had I time: had I power. A very little writing uses up my capacity for writing.

  Virginia Woolf

  Writing, Use, Littles

  Virginia Woolf (2003). “A Writer's Diary”, p.123, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• ... I doubt the capacity of the human animal for being dignified in ceremony.

  Virginia Woolf

  Animal, Doubt, Ceremony

  Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.4383, Delphi Classics

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Talent is the capacity of doing anything that depends on application and industry and it is a voluntary power, while genius is involuntary.

  William Hazlitt

  Genius, Talent, Involuntary

  8 Copy quote

• He who expects from a great name in politics, in philosophy, in art, equal greatness in other things, is little versed in human nature. Our strength lies in our weakness. The learned in books are ignorant of the world. He who is ignorant of books is often well acquainted with other things; for life is of the same length in the learned and unlearned; the mind cannot be idle; if it is not taken up with one thing, it attends to another through choice or necessity; and the degree of previous capacity in one class or another is a mere lottery.

  William Hazlitt

  Art, Lying, Philosophy

  William Hazlitt (2015). “Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)”, p.1471, Delphi Classics

  67 Copy quote

  Show source

• When I consider the wonderful activity of the mind, so great a memory of what is past, and such a capacity of penetrating into the future: when I behold such a number of arts and sciences, and such a multitude of discoveries hence arising,--I believe and am firmly persuaded that a nature which contains so many things within itself cannot be mortal.

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Art, Memories, Believe

  10 Copy quote

• A successful life for a man or for a woman seems to me to lie in the knowledge that one has developed to the limit the capacities with which one was endowed; that one has contributed something constructive to family and friends and to a home community; that one has brought happiness wherever it was possible; that one has earned one's way in the world, has kept some friends, and need not be ashamed to face oneself honestly.

  Eleanor Roosevelt

  Success, Lying, Home

  Eleanor Roosevelt (1946). “If You Ask Me”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• For poetry is, I believe, always an act of the spirit. The poem teaches us something while we make it. The poem makes you as you make the poem, and your making of the poem requires all your capacities of thought, feeling, analysis, and synthesis.

  May Sarton

  Believe, Feelings, Analysis

  5 Copy quote

• Laws have come down to us from old customs and folk-ways based on primitive ideas of man's origin, capacity and responsibility.

  Clarence Darrow

  Responsibility, Men, Law

  Clarence Darrow (2012). “Crime: Its Cause and Treatment”, p.30, The Floating Press

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• True Love can be no deeper than your capacity for friendship, no higher than your ideals, and no broader than the scope of your vision.

  Helen Rowland

  Vision, Scope, Deeper

  Irvin S. Cobb, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Helen Rowland, Richard Saunders (2017). “We Should All Be So Feminine: We Should All Be a Feminist: We Should All Be Feminists”, p.47, Lulu.com

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• I'm beginning to feel that the real endangered species on planet earth are not the whales and the elephants but those of us who can laugh at the world and ourselves. ... I fear the dry turn of the American mind, this focus on the literal, as much as I fear our capacity for self-destruction. We've become hagridden by facts, obsessed with product instead of process. Where's the energetic wit, the looney outlook, the frivolity, the lightness of comforting laughter? It has become fashionable to know and unfashionable to feel, and you can't really laugh if you can't feel.

  Rita Mae Brown

  Laughter, Real, Humor

  5 Copy quote

• Humanity . . . lies in man's capacity to question the known and imagine the unknown.

  Margaret Mead

  Lying, Men, Humanity

  Margaret Mead, Robert B. Textor (2005). “The World Ahead: An Anthropologist Anticipates the Future”, p.250, Berghahn Books

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Many people misjudge the permanent effect of sorrow, and their capacity to live in the past.

  Ivy Compton-Burnett

  Past, People, Sorrow

  Ivy Compton-Burnett (2012). “Mother and Son”, p.18, A&C Black

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• the reward for total abstinence from alcohol seems, illogically enough, to be the capacity for becoming intoxicated without it.

  Rebecca West

  Drinking, Addiction, Alcohol

  Rebecca West (2010). “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia”, p.373, Open Road Media

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• An audience proves its discipline by its capacity for stillness. Those who have never practiced continuous application to an exacting process cannot settle down to simple watching; they must chew gum, they must dig the peel off their oranges, they must shift from foot to foot, from buttock to buttock.

  Rebecca West

  Simple, Feet, Orange

  Rebecca West (1982). “Black lamb and grey falcon: a journey through Yugoslavia”, Penguin (Non-Classics)

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• Not the absorption capacity of the land, but the creative ability of a people, is the true yardstick with which we can measure the immigration potentialities of the land.

  David Ben-Gurion

  Land, People, Creative

  9 Copy quote

• We humans should never forget our capacity to connect with the collective spirit of animals. Their energy is essential to our future growth.

  Shirley MacLaine

  Animal, Growth, Energy

  5 Copy quote

• I'm attracted to soccer's capacity for beauty. When well played, the game is a dance with a ball.

  Eduardo Galeano

  Soccer, Games, Balls

  "Social poet captures the beautiful game". Interview with Roger Bennett, www.espn.com. October 9, 2013.

  5 Copy quote

  Show source