Incapable Quotes - Page 13

• If I am incapable of washing dishes joyfully, if I want to finish them quickly so I can go and have dessert, I will be equally incapable of enjoying my dessert. With the fork in my hand, I will be thinking about what to do next, and the texture and flavor of the dessert, together with the pleasure of eating it, will be lost. I will always be dragged into the future, never able to live in the present moment.

  Nhat Hanh

  Thinking, Hands, Together

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• Macroeconomics, even with all of our computers and with all of our information - is not an exact science and is incapable of being an exact science.

  Paul Samuelson

  Information, Computer, Macroeconomics

  Interview with Conor Clarke, www.theatlantic.com. June 17, 2009.

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• In the long run [censorship] will create a generation incapable of appreciating the difference between independence of thought and subservience.

  Henry Steele Commager

  Running, Differences, Long

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• I wish my life and decisions to depend upon myself, not on external forces of whatever kind. I wish to be the instrument of my own, not other men's, acts of will. I wish to be the subject, not an object...I wish to be somebody, not nobody; a doer - deciding, not being decided for, slef-directed and not acted upon by external nature or by other men as if I were a thing, or an animal, or a slave incapable of playing a human role, that is, of conceiving goals and policies of my own and realizing them.

  Isaiah Berlin

  Men, Animal, Goal

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• If I thought that any poem of mine could have been written by anyone else, either a contemporary or a forerunner, I should suppress it with a blush; and I should do the same if I ever found I were imitating myself. Every poem should be new, unexpected, inimitable, and incapable of being parodied.

  Robert Graves

  Unexpected, Should, Found

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• I think anybody incapable of changing his mind is crazy.

  William S. Burroughs

  Crazy, Thinking, Mind

  "Personal Quotes/ Biography". www.imdb.com.

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• As a novelist, I cannot occupy myself with "characters," or at any rate central ones, who lack panache, in one or another sense, who would be incapable of a major action or a major passion, or who have not a touch of the ambiguity, the ultimate unaccountability, the enlarging mistiness of persons "in history." History, as more austerely I now know it, is not romantic. But I am.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Passion, Character, History

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• ... in general, the Anglo-Irish do not make good dancers; they are too spritely and conscious; they are incapable of one kind of trance or of being seemingly impersonal. And, for the formal, pure dance they lack the formality: about their stylishness (for they have stylishness) there is something impromptu, slightly disorderly.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Dance, Kind, Conscious

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• It used to be said in antislavery days that a people who would tacitly consent to the enslavement of 4,000,000 human beings were incapable of being just to each other, and I believe this same rule holds with regard to the injustice practiced by men towards women. So long as all men conspire to rob women of the citizen's right to perfect equality in all the privileges and immunities of our so-called "free" government, we can not expect these same men to be capable of perfect justice to each other.

  Susan B. Anthony

  Believe, Equality, Men

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• Since [man] is infinitely removed from comprehending the extremes, the end of things and their beginning are hopelessly hidden from him in an impenetrable secret; he is equally incapable of seeing the nothing from which he was made, and the infinite in which he is swallowed up.

  Blaise Pascal

  Knowledge, Men, Secret

  Blaise Pascal (2013). “Pascal's Pensees”, p.21, Simon and Schuster

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• In a language known to us, we have substituted the opacity of the sounds with the transparence of the ideas. But a language we donot know is a closed place in which the one we love can deceive us, making us, locked outside and convulsed in our impotence, incapable of seeing or preventing anything.

  Marcel Proust

  Love, Ideas, Sound

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• There will always be critics eager to fashion opinions for the lazy and incapable.

  John Cage

  Fashion, Lazy, Opinion

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• No woman is capable of being beautiful who is not incapable of being false.

  Richard Steele

  Beauty, Beautiful, Being Beautiful

  Joseph Addison, Sir Richard Steele (1853). “The Spectator: With a Biographical and Critical Preface, and Explanatory Notes ...”, p.104

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• There is a beginning and end to all life - and to all human endeavors. Species evolve and die off. Empires rise, then break apart. Businesses grow, then fold. There are no exceptions. I'm OK with all that. Yet it pains me to bear witness to the sixth great extinction, where we humans are directly responsible for the extirpation of so many wonderful creatures and invaluable indigenous cultures. It saddens me to observe the plight of our own species; we appear to be incapable of solving our problems.

  Yvon Chouinard

  Pain, Culture, Plight

  Yvon Chouinard (2016). “Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman--Including 10 More Years of Business Unusual”, p.16, Penguin

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• If ever this vast country is brought under a single government, it will be one of the most extensive corruption, indifferent and incapable of a wholesome care over so wide a spread of surface. This will not be borne, and you will have to choose between reform and revolution. If I know the spirit of this country, the one or the other is inevitable.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Country, Government, Reform

  B. L. Rayner, Thomas Jefferson (1834). “Life of Thomas Jefferson: with selections from the most valuable portions of his voluminious and unrivalled private correspondence : with portrait”, p.349

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• A competent and self-confident person is incapable of jealousy in anything. Jealousy is invariably a symptom. Just like right now with the whole mortgage crisis, I want to help people get back into their homes.

  Magic Johnson

  Home, Self, People

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• The practice of utter sincerity towards other men would avail to no good end, if they were incapable of practising it towards their own minds. In fact, truth cannot be communicated until it is perceived.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Men, Practice, Mind

  Percy Bysshe Shelley (1859). “Shelley Memorials: From Authentic Sources : Now First Printed”, p.277

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• To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference.

  Joan Didion

  Love, Respect, Self

  Joan Didion (1968). “Slouching towards Bethlehem”

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• There is, on the whole, nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school. To begin with, it is a prison. But in some respects more cruel than a prison. In a prison, for instance, you are not forced to read books written by the warders and the governor. . . .In the prison you are not forced to sit listening to turnkeys discoursing without charm or interest on subjects that they don't understand and don't care about, and therefore incapable of making you understand or care about. In a prison they may torture your body; but they do not torture your brains.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Book, School, People

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• For the air of lonely men surrounded him now, a still atmosphere in which the world around him slipped away, leaving him incapable of relationship, an atmosphere against which neither will nor longing availed. This was one of the significant earmarks of his life.

  Hermann Hesse

  Lonely, Men, Air

  Hermann Hesse (1980). “Six Novels: With Other Stories and Essays”

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• Without wonder, men and women would lapse into deadening routine and little by little would become incapable of a life which is genuinely personal.

  Pope John Paul II

  Men, Routine, Lapses

  Pope John Paul II (1998). “Faith and Reason: Encyclical Letter Fides Et Ratio of the Supreme Pontiff John Paul II to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Relationship Between Faith and Reason”

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• [Camila] was quite incapable of establishing any harmony between the claims of her art, of her appetites, or her dreams, and of her crowded daily routine. Each of these was a world in itself.

  Thornton Wilder

  Dream, Art, Routine

  Thornton Wilder (1961). “Twayne's United States Authors Series”

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• It seems to me that a man who is incapable of humor is capable of cruelty.

  Bette Greene

  Men, Cruelty, Seems

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• People who are sensible about love are incapable of it.

  Douglas Yates

  Love, Relationship, Breakup

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• Don't eat anything incapable of rotting.

  Michael Pollan

  Rotting, Real Food

  Michael Pollan (2008). “In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto”, p.101, Penguin

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