Incapable Quotes - Page 15

• Horror is a feeling that cannot last long; human nature is incapable of supporting it. Sadness, whether it be from bereavement, or disappointment, or misfortune of any kind may linger on through life

  James De Mille

  Disappointment, Sadness, Long

  James De Mille (2015). “A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder”, p.108, Booklassic

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• Actors who are lovers in real life are often incapable if playing the part of lovers to an audience. It is equally true that sympathy between actors who are not lovers may create a temporary emotion that is perfectly sincere.

  Ivor Novello

  Real, Actors, May

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• To be free one needs constant and unrelenting vigilance over one's weaknesses. A vigilance which requires a moral energy most of us are incapable of manufacturing. We relax back into the moulds of habit. They are secure, they bind us and keep us contained at the expense of freedom. To break the moulds, to be heedless of the seductions of security is an impossible struggle, but one of the few that count. To be free is to learn, to test yourself constantly, to gamble.

  Robyn Davidson

  Inspirational, Freedom, Struggle

  Robyn Davidson (2012). “Tracks”, p.220, A&C Black

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• There are moments when people are incapable of understanding happiness.

  Paulo Coelho

  People, Understanding, Moments

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• MONOSYLLABIC, adj. Composed of words of one syllable . . . Commonly Saxon - that is to say, words of a barbarous people destitute of ideas and incapable of any but the most elementary sentiments and emotions.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Ideas, People, Emotion

  Ambrose Bierce (2001). “The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary”, p.166, University of Georgia Press

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• An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.

  Raymond Chandler

  Age, Literature, Kind

  Raymond Chandler, Dorothy Gardiner, Kathrine Sorley Walker (1977). “Raymond Chandler Speaking”, p.75, Univ of California Press

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• Because I have become such a solitary, and not in the Aristotelian sense: not a beast, not a god. Rather, a loner troubled by longings, incapable of finding a suitable language and despairing at the impossibility of composing messages in a playable key--as if I no longer understood the codes used by the estimable people who wanted to hear from me and would have so much to reply if only the impediments were taken away.

  Saul Bellow

  Taken, Keys, People

  Saul Bellow (2010). “Saul Bellow: Letters”, p.422, Penguin

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• People are never satisfied. If they have a little, they want more. If they have a lot, they want still more. Once they have more, they wish they could be happy with little, but are incapable of making the slightest effort in that direction.

  Paulo Coelho

  People, Effort, Wish

  Paulo Coelho (2009). “The Winner Stands Alone”, p.50, HarperCollins UK

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• For human words are like shadows, and shadows are incapable of explaining light and between shadow and light there is the opaque body from which words are born.

  Jose Saramago

  Light, Shadow, Body

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• The American elite is almost beyond redemption. . . . Moral relativism has set in so deeply that the gilded classes have become incapable of discerning right from wrong. Everything can be explained away, especially by journalists. Life is one great moral mush--sophistry washed down with Chardonnay. The ordinary citizens, thank goodness, still adhere to absolutes.... It is they who have saved the republic from creeping degradation while their 'betters' were derelict.

  Charles Dickens

  Class, Ordinary, Citizens

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• I am incapable of telling you not to feel. Feel, feel, I say - feel for all you're worth, and even if it half kills you, for that is the only way to live.

  Henry James

  Life, Way To Live, Half

  Henry James (1984). “Letters”, Belknap Press

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• The people who, during the election, were so wise, so moral, so perfect, now have no tendencies whatever; or if they have any, they are tendencies that lead downward to degradation. . . . If people are as incapable, as immoral, and as ignorant as the politicians indicate, then why is the right of these same people to vote defended with such passionate insistence?

  Frederic Bastiat

  Wise, Perfect, People

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• There exists in our society widespread fear of judging…[B]ehind the unwillingness to judge lurks the suspicion that no one is a free agent, and hence doubt that anyone is responsible or could be expected to answer for what he has done…Who has ever maintained that by judging a wrong I presuppose that I myself would be incapable of committing it?

  Hannah Arendt

  Judging, Doubt, Would Be

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• It is often tragic to see how blatantly a man bungles his own life and the lives of others yet remains totally incapable of seeing how much the whole tragedy originates in himself, and how he continually feeds it and keeps it going.

  Carl Jung

  Life, Men, Tragedy

  Carl Gustav Jung (1959). “pt. 1. The archetypes and the collective unconscious”

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• Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.

  Blaise Pascal

  Inspirational, Men, Vision

  Blaise Pascal (1966). “Pascal Pensées”, Penguin Classics

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• Dogs love their friends and bite their enemies, quite unlike people, who are incapable of pure love and always have to mix love and hate.

  Sigmund Freud

  Cute, Dog, Hate

  Sigmund Freud (1992). “The Diary of Sigmund Freud 1929-1939: A Record of the Final Decade”

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• Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it.

  Hannah Arendt

  Creating, Violence

  Hannah Arendt (1970). “On Violence”, p.62, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The people who are abroad are all those that have no religion, neither one based on speculation nor one received by tradition. Such are the extreme Turks that wander about in the north, the Kushites who live in the south, and those in our country who are like these. I consider these as irrational beings, and not as human beings; they are below mankind, but above monkeys, since they have the form and shape of man, and a mental faculty above that of the monkey.

  Maimonides

  Country, Religious, Animal

  Moses Maimonides (1961). “The Guide for the Perplexed”, p.384, Courier Corporation

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• In my day we let the wolfswans incapable of birthing our young die. (Markus) Then it’s a good thing we’re in the twenty-first century and not the Dark Ages, isn’t it? (Fang)

  Sherrilyn Kenyon

  Dark, Age, Twenties

  Sherrilyn Kenyon (2009). “Born of Ice”, p.347, Macmillan

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• The ideas of Freud were popularized by people who only imperfectly understood them, who were incapable of the great effort required to grasp them in their relationship to larger truths, and who therefore assigned to them a prominence out of all proportion to their true importance.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Ideas, People, Effort

  Dialogues (1954) (entry for 3 June 1943)

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• Feelings and stories of unworthiness and shame are perhaps the most binding element in the trance of fear. When we believe something is wrong with us, we are convinced we are in danger. Our shame fuels ongoing fear, and our fear fuels more shame. The very fact that we feel fear seems to prove that we are broken or incapable. When we are trapped in trance, being fearful and bad seem to define who we are. The anxiety in our body, the stories, the ways we make excuses, withdraw or lash out—these become to us the self that is most real.

  Tara Brach

  Real, Believe, Self

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• Life is and will ever remain an equation incapable of solution, but it contains certain known factors.

  Nikola Tesla

  Inspirational, Life, Science

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• Men often become what they believe themselves to be. If I believe I cannot do something,it makes me incapable of doing it. When I believe I can,I acquire the ability to do it even if I didn’t have it in the beginning.’"Mahatma Gandhi

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Freedom, Believe, Men

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• Being with a man incapable of telling a lie – a whole lot of awesome. Being with a man who could taste when you lied – sucked the big one.

  Gena Showalter

  Lying, Men, Taste

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• One thing was absolutely certain—it was a given for Kazuo. Although he might not have particularlyrealized it, or more appropriately, perhaps because he was incapable of coming to such a realization, this was what it came down to: he, Kazuo Kiriyama, felt no emotion, no guilt, no sorrow, no pity, towards the four corpses, including Mitsuru's—and that ever since the day he was dropped into this world theway he was, he had never once felt a single emotion.

  Koushun Takami

  Sorrow, Guilt, Realization

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