Incapable Quotes - Page 12

• Those with very loud voices in their throats are nearly incapable of thinking subtle thoughts.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Thoughtful, Thinking, Loud Voices

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• Musick is certainly a very agreeable Entertainment, but if it would take the entire Possession of our Ears, if it would make us incapable of hearing Sense, if it would exclude Arts that have a much greater Tendency to the Refinement of human Nature; I must confess I would allow it no better Quarter than Plato has done, who banishes it out of his Common-wealth.

  Joseph Addison

  Music, Art, Plato

  Joseph Addison (1867). “The Works of Joseph Addison: Including the Whole Contents of Bp. Hurd's Edition, with Letters and Other Pieces Not Found in Ay Previous Collection; and Macaulay's Essay on His Life and Works”, p.65

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• Im plain incapable of getting angry with Angela Merkel and likewise.

  Donald Tusk

  Angela, Angry

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• Those who devote their lives to earning a living are incapable of living a human existence.

  Herbert Marcuse

  Earning, Existence, Humans

  Herbert Marcuse (2013). “One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society”, p.134, Routledge

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• Yet the people, and even the clergy, incapable of forming any rational judgment of the business of peace and war, presumed to arraign the policy of Stilicho, who so often vanquished, so often surrounded, and so often dismissed the implacable enemy of the republic. The first moment of the public safety is devoted to gratitude and joy; but the second is diligently occupied by envy and calumny.

  Edward Gibbon

  Gratitude, War, People

  Edward Gibbon (2009). “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Edited and Abridged): Abridged Edition”, p.552, Modern Library

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• Those who are incapable of shining out by dress would do well to consider that the contrast between them and their clothes turns out much to their disadvantage.

  William Shenstone

  Clothes, Shining, Dresses

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• I have often felt as though I had inherited all the defiance and all the passions with which our ancestors defended their Temple and could gladly sacrifice my life for one great moment in history. And at the same time I always felt so helpless and incapable of expressing these ardent passions even by a word or a poem.

  Sigmund Freud

  Passion, Sacrifice, Temples

  Sigmund Freud, Ernst L. Freud (1960). “Letters of Sigmund Freud”, p.202, Courier Corporation

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• There is an assumption, in attaching Puritan concepts such as 'successful' and 'unsuccessful' to the awful, final act of suicide, that those who 'fail' at killing themselves not only are weak, but incompetent, incapable even of getting their dying quite right.

  Kay Redfield Jamison

  Suicide, Successful, Dying

  Kay Redfield Jamison (2014). “An Unquiet Mind: A memoir of moods and madness”, p.72, Pan Macmillan

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• I think it is a cornerstone of our electoral system that you raise electoral funds for elections but that doesn't mean that therefore the implication can be made that the recipients are incapable of transacting their interests and their duties towards people any differently.

  Bill Shorten

  Mean, Thinking, People

  "Bill Shorten faces 'difficult' royal commission questioning over political staffer's salary". Interview with Adam Harvey, www.abc.net.au. July 8, 2015.

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• Weddings in our society seem designed to reduce the bride and groom to precisely the condition of those who, because they 'lack sufficient use of reason,' are 'incapable of contracting marriage,' according to canon law.

  Nancy Mairs

  Law, Use, Our Society

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• I have found that the only thing that does bring you happiness is doing something good for somebody who is incapable of doing it for themselves.

  David Letterman

  Doe, Found

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• 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.

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• Someone who is incapable of drawing, and cannot master line or colour perspective can always express themselves in some form of abstraction.

  Hans Werner Henze

  Drawing, Perspective, Lines

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• When I consider the state of things in our fief, I find that those who hold positions and receive official stipends are incapable of the utmost in loyalty and patriotic service. Loyalty of the usual sort-perhaps, but if it is true loyalty and service you seek, then you must abandon this fief and plan a grass-roots uprising.

  Yoshida Shoin

  Loyalty, Patriotic, Uprising

  "Yoshida Shoin Zenshu" by Yoshida Shoin, vol. IX, 1938.

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• The Germans, in the age of Tacitus, were unacquainted with the use of letters; and the use of letters is the principal circumstance that distinguishes a civilised people from a herd of savages incapable of knowledge or reflection. Without that artificial help, the human memory soon dissipates or corrupts the ideas intrusted to her charge; and the nobler faculties of the mind, no longer supplied with models or with materials, gradually forget their powers; the judgment becomes feeble and lethargic, the imagination languid or irregular.

  Edward Gibbon

  Memories, Reflection, Ideas

  Edward Gibbon (1854). “The history of the decline and fall of the Roman empire”, p.354

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• Long accustomed to the use of European manufactures, [the Cherokee Indians] are as incapable of returning to their habits of skinsand furs as we are, and find their wants the less tolerable as they are occasioned by a war [the American Revolution] the event of which is scarcely interesting to them.

  Thomas Jefferson

  War, Long, Interesting

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• He who does nothing renders himself incapable of doing any thing; but while we are executing any work, we are preparing and qualifying ourselves to undertake another.

  William Hazlitt

  Work, Doe, Executing

  William Hazlitt (2015). “Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)”, p.1846, Delphi Classics

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• The Past is dead, and has no resurrection; but the Future is endowed with such a life, that it lives to us even in anticipation. The Past is, in many things, the foe of mankind; the Future is, in all things, our friend. In the Past is no hope; The Future is both hope and fruition. The Past is the text-book of tyrants; the Future is the Bible of the Free. Those who are solely governed by the Past stand like Lot's wife, crystallized in the act of looking backward, and forever incapable of looking before.

  Herman Melville

  Book, Past, Tyrants

  Herman Melville (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Herman Melville (Illustrated)”, p.1541, Delphi Classics

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• Despite the fact that there's billions of dollars sitting in the Iraqi government reserves, somehow they are incapable of getting it out to the people. There are a very large number of people here who are on the edge of starvation. For those sort of people - a sizable chunk of people - that service makes them regard Muqtada as a sort of god.

  Patrick Cockburn

  Government, Numbers, People

  "Who Is Iraq’s 'Firebrand Cleric'?". Interview with Justin Elliott, www.motherjones.com. March 31, 2008.

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• I think the condition of imperial denial is a handicap because if you do not recognize that you are essentially performing the functions of an empire, you are incapable of learning from the mistakes of past empires.

  Niall Ferguson

  Mistake, Past, Thinking

  "Imperial Denial". Interview with Nonna Gorilovskaya, www.motherjones.com. May 21, 2004.

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• Those who constantly qualify everything and have no opinions of their own are ultimately just as incapable of tolerance.

  Wolfgang Schauble

  Tolerance, Opinion

  "SPIEGEL Interview with Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble: 'We Have No Relationship to our Diverse Muslim Society'". Interview with Jan Fleischhauer and Holger Stark, www.spiegel.de. September 20, 2006.

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• The whole machinery of our intelligence, our general ideas and laws, fixed and external objects, principles, persons, and gods, are so many symbolic, algebraic expressions. They stand for experience; experience which we are incapable of retaining and surveying in its multitudinous immediacy. We should flounder hopelessly, like the animals, did we not keep ourselves afloat and direct our course by these intellectual devices. Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of fact.

  George Santayana

  Ignorance, Animal, Expression

  George Santayana (1936). “The Works of George Santayana”

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• Let us now speak according to natural lights. If there is a God, He is infinitely incomprehensible. . . . We are then incapable of knowing of either what He is or if He is. . . .

  Blaise Pascal

  Light, If There Is A God, Knowing

  Blaise Pascal (2016). “Pensées”, p.97, Open Road Media

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• [There are m]oral precepts that we consider really important, such as 'don't pick your nose' or 'don't eat peas with a knife'. There may, for ought I know, be admirable reasons for eating peas with a knife, but . . . early persuasion has made me completely incapable of appreciating them.

  Bertrand Russell

  Knives, Appreciate, Important

  Bertrand Russell (2004). “Power: A New Social Analysis”, p.221, Psychology Press

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• I have no memory for things I have learned, nor things I have read, nor things experienced or heard, neither for people nor events; I feel that I have experienced nothing, learned nothing, that I actually know less than the average schoolboy, and that what I do know is superficial, and that every second question is beyond me. I am incapable of thinking deliberately; my thoughts run into a wall. I can grasp the essence of things in isolation, but I am quite incapable of coherent, unbroken thinking. I can't even tell a story properly; in fact, I can scarcely talk.

  Franz Kafka

  Running, Memories, Wall

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