Inability Quotes - Page 7

• In underground music, there seems to be this real inability for people to express themselves in any kind of heroic or mythological way. There's this idea that we're all normal joes, and that creating a persona onstage or having schtick is somehow false and misleading and evil.

  Ian Svenonius

  Real, Ideas, Creating

  9 Copy quote

• ISIS is a radical jihadist group that is increasingly sophisticated in its ability, for example, to radicalize American citizens, in its inability to exploit loopholes in our legal immigration system, in its ability to capture and hold territory in the Middle East, as I outlined earlier, in multiple countries.

  Marco Rubio

  Country, Middle East, Immigration

  Source: cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• [Wilson] has this strange inability to censor himself, and he'll say these things that are sometimes quite caustic or end up creating some kind of violent reaction, you know. But, you know, I admire that.

  Woody Harrelson

  Creating, Strange, Kind

  Source: collider.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The #1 problem most patients face is the inability to love themselves

  Bernie Siegel

  Inability To Love, Faces, Patient

  9 Copy quote

• Some of my youthful readers are developing wonderful imaginations. This pleases me. When I was young I longed to write a great novel that should win me fame. Now that I am getting old my first book is written to amuse children. For aside from my evident inability to do anything "great," I have learned to regard fame as a will-o-the-wisp which, when caught, is not worth the possession; but to please a child is a sweet and lovely thing that warms one's heart and brings its own reward.

  L. Frank Baum

  Sweet, Children, Book

  Introduction to "The Lost Princess of Oz", 1917.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• I have an inability to relax. I try to make every day a work day. I get pleasure from work... I try to think of sketch ideas, stand-up pieces. I am incapable of leisure and leisure time.

  Fred Armisen

  Thinking, Ideas, Trying

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• The Andrians were the first of the islanders to refuse Themistocles' demand for money. He had put it to them that they would be unable to avoid paying, because the Athenians had the support of two powerful deities, one called Persuasion and the other Compulsion.The Andrians had replied that Athens was lucky to have two such useful gods, who were obviously responsible for her wealth and greatness; unfortunately, they themselves, in their small & inadequate land, had two utterly useless deities, who refused to leave the island and insisted on staying; and their names were Poverty and Inability.

  Herodotus

  Powerful, Greatness, Land

  13 Copy quote

• Our ability to look back on the past, our need or desire to make sense of it, is both a blessing and a curse; and our inability to see into the future with any degree of accuracy is, simultaneously, the thing that saves us and the thing that condemns us.

  James Robertson

  Blessing, Past, Desire

  James Robertson (2010). “And the Land Lay Still”, p.23, Penguin UK

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The business changes. The technology changes. The team changes. The team members change. The problem isn't change, per se, because change is going to happen; the problem, rather, is the inability to cope with change when it comes.

  Kent Beck

  Team, Technology, Problem

  Kent Beck (2000). “Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change”, p.28, Addison-Wesley Professional

  55 Copy quote

  Show source

• Inability to distinguish doctrine is spreading far and wide, and so long as the preacher is "clever" and "earnest," hundreds seem to think it must be all right, and call you dreadfully "narrow and uncharitable" if you hint that he is unsound!

  J. C. Ryle

  Clever, Thinking, Long

  J.C RYLE, Rev Terry Kulakowski, Editor “HOLINESS;BEING PLAIN PAPERS ON ITS NATURE, HINDRANCES, DIFFICULTIES AND ROOTS”, Lulu.com

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• We are not, of course, optimistic about our chances of success. Some form of ecocatastrophe, if not thermonuclear war, seems almost certain to overtake us before the end of the century. (The inability to forecast exactly which one - whether plague, famine, the poisoning of the oceans, drastic climatic change, or some disaster entirely unforeseen - is hardly grounds for complacency.)

  John Holdren

  War, Ocean, Optimistic

  4 Copy quote

• The biggest threat to this country isn't the Russians. It's our own inability to make democracy or capitalism work.

  Phil Donahue

  Country, Democracy, Threat

  7 Copy quote

• Onstage it was always comfortable for me because that's where I felt at home. Offstage it was a different situation. I was still shy offstage and unfortunately, my shyness and my inability to communicate and really have great conversations or be part of the gang - in inverted commas - led me to the drug addiction, which, you know, blighted my life for 16 years because I thought by doing that it would make me join in.

  Elton John

  Home, Years, Addiction

  "A More Reflective Leap On Elton John's 'Diving Board'". "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross, www.npr.org. September 23, 2013.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The care of the critic should be to distinguish error from inability, faults of inexperience from defects of nature.

  Samuel Johnson

  Errors, Inexperience, Care

  Samuel Johnson (1800). “The Idler: With Additional Essays”, p.85

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I am very up front about about my inability to pronounce things correctly.

  Gillian Jacobs

  Fronts

  "Do You Sometimes Mispronounce Designer Names? This TV Star Does and Totally Owns It". Interview with Fawnia Soo Hoo, www.glamour.com. April 29, 2014.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The future has become uninhabitable. Such hopelessness can arise, I think, only from an inability to face the present, to live in the present, to live as a responsible being among other beings in this sacred world here and now, which is all we have, and all we need, to found our hope upon.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Future, Thinking, Sacred

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1997). “Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places”, p.103, Grove Press

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• My principal failing as a writer is the lack of spontaneity; the nuisance of parallel thoughts, second thoughts, third thoughts; inability to express myself properly in any language unless I compose every damned sentence in my bath, in my mind, at my desk.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Mind, Nuisance, Baths

  Source: www.slate.com

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• Embellishment is an irresistible and consuming impulse, going back to the beginnings of human history. ... Probably the strongest motivating force is the simplest: the inability of almost everyone to ever leave well enough alone.

  Ada Louise Huxtable

  Enough, Embellishment, Force

  Ada Louise Huxtable (1986). “ARCHITECTURE, ANYONE?”, Random House

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• ... clear thinking is not the characteristic which distinguishes our literature today. We are more and more caught up by the unintelligible. People like it. This argues an inability to think, or, almost as bad, a disinclination to think.

  Edith Hamilton

  Thinking, People, Literature

  Edith Hamilton (1964). “The Ever-Present Past”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Economists say the inability to delay gratification is a primary predictor of economic failure in life.

  Brian Tracy

  Delay, Economic, Economist

  6 Copy quote

• The widespread inability to understand technological artifacts as fabricated entities, as social and cultural phenomena, derives from the fact that in retrospect only those technologies that prove functional for a culture and can be integrated into everyday life are 'left over.' However, the perception of what is functional, successful and useful is itself the product of social and cultural--and last but not least--political and economic processes. Selection processes and abandoned products and product forms are usually not discussed.

  Johannes Grenzfurthner

  Successful, Technology, Political

  4 Copy quote

• The idea that money brings power and independence is an illusion. What money usually brings is the need for more money - and there is a shabby and pathetic powerlessness that comes with that need. The inability to risk new lives, new work, new styles of thought and experience, is more often than not tied to the bourgeois fear of reducing one's material standard of living. That is, indeed, to be owned by possessions, to be governed by a sense of property rather than by a sense of self.

  Vivian Gornick

  Money, Self, Ideas

  12 Copy quote

• Question of "Where We Begin" turns to be not only a formal question but also a question central to the attempt to make sense of things about which it is very difficult to make any sense - illness, death, despair, suicides, cruelty, the various troubles love can provoke, our inability to really know one another when we our inner selves are walled off by our bodies.

  Kyle Minor

  Suicide, Self, Despair

  4 Copy quote

• At the heart of the failure of most plays is the inability to carry on a thoughtful conversation about your work with yourself.

  Marsha Norman

  Heart, Thoughtful, Play

  4 Copy quote

• Rock bottom is an inability to cope with the commonplace that is so extreme it makes even the grandest and loveliest things unbearable...Rock bottom is everything out of focus. It's a failure of vision, a failure to see the world as it is, to see the good in what it is, and only to wonder why the hell things look the way they do and not some other way.

  Elizabeth Wurtzel

  Rocks, Focus, Vision

  4 Copy quote