Incapacity Quotes - Page 4

• My chronic feelings of emptiness and boredom came from the fact that I was living a life based on my incapacities, which were numerous.

  Susanna Kaysen

  Boredom, Feelings, Facts

  Susanna Kaysen (2013). “Girl, Interrupted”, p.154, Vintage

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• Pity is one of the noblest emotions available to human beings; self-pity is possibly the most ignoble . . . . [It] is an incapacity, a crippling emotional disease that severely distorts our perception of reality . . . a narcotic that leaves its addicts wasted and derelict.

  Eugene H. Peterson

  Attitude, Reality, Emotional

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• All warfare is based on deception. Therefore, when capable, feign incapacity; when active, inactivity. When near, make it appear that you are far away; when far away, that you are to lure him; feign disorder and strike him. When he concentrates, prepare against him; where he is strong, avoid him. Anger his general and confuse him. Pretend inferiority and encourage his arrogance.

  Sun Tzu

  Strong, Arrogance, Deception

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• No engineer can go upon a new work and not find something peculiar, that will demand his careful reflection, and the deliberate consideration of any advice that he may receive; and nothing so fully reveals his incapacity as a pretentious assumption of knowledge, claiming to understand everything.

  John B. Jervis

  Hard Work, Knowledge, Science

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• While I am proud of a number of accomplishments, there are real costs to being unreasonable. Long hours. Too little time with family. A near incapacity for, as they say, stopping and smelling the roses.

  Eli Broad

  Success, Real, Hard Work

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• A principle is a principle and in no case can it be watered down because of our incapacity to live it in practice. We have to strive to achieve it, and the striving should be conscious, deliberate and hard.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Leadership, Perseverance, Practice

  Mahatma Gandhi, Anand T. Hingorani, Ganga Anand Hingorani (1985). “The Encyclopaedia of Gandhian Thoughts”

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• The Chinese tell time by 'The Year of the Horse' or 'The Year of the Dragon.' I tell time by 'The Year of the Back' and 'The Year of the Elbow.' This year it's 'The Year of the Ulnar Nerve.' Someone once asked me if I had any physical incapacities of my own. 'Sure I do,' I said. 'One big one - Jim Palmer.'

  Earl Weaver

  Horse, Dragons, Years

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• Logic, n. The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding. The basic of logic is the syllogism, consisting of a major and a minor premise and a conclusion - thus: Major Premise: Sixty men can do a piece of work sixty times as quickly as one man. Minor Premise: One man can dig a post-hole in sixty seconds; Therefore- Conclusion: Sixty men can dig a post-hole in one second. This may be called syllogism arithmetical, in which, by combining logic and mathematics, we obtain a double certainty and are twice blessed.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Art, Blessed, Science

  "The Devil's Dictionary:". Book by Ambrose Bierce (p. 204), 2008.

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• Don't be discouraged by your incapacity to dispel darkness from the world. Light your little candle and step forward.

  Mata Amritanandamayi

  Light, Darkness, World

  Twitter post from Nov 09, 2015

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• The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance.

  Roland Barthes

  Names, Symptoms, Disturbance

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• Hell is the incapacity to be other than the creature one finds oneself ordinarily behaving as.

  Aldous Huxley

  Hell, Creatures, Oneself

  Aldous Huxley (1955). “The Collected Works of Aldous Huxley”

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• Incapacity to appreciate certain types of beauty may be the condition sine qua non for the appreciation of another kind; the greatest capacity both for enjoyment and creation is highly specialized and exclusive, and hence the greatest ages of art have often been strangely intolerant. The invectives of one school against another, perverse as they are philosophically, are artistically often signs of health, because they indicate a vital appreciation of certain kinds of beauty, a love of them that has grown into a jealous passion.

  George Santayana

  Appreciation, Art, Passion

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• The common prejudice against philosophy is the result of the incapacity of the multitude to deal with the highest problems.

  John Lancaster Spalding

  Philosophy, Prejudice, Common

  John Lancaster Spalding (1901). “Aphorisms and Reflections: Conduct, Culture and Religion”

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• [The Community's] crosses and trials give me confidence. But I derive my hope above all, and most especially, from our utter incapacity, for it is always upon nothingness that God is pleased to rear His works. If at any day we accomplish some good here, the glory will certainly be His alone, since He has employed for this end instruments more capable of spoiling everything than of making it succeed.

  Theodore Guerin

  Giving, Community, Trials

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• He who wants to educate himself in Chess must evade what is dead in Chess... the habit of playing with inferior opponents; the custom of avoiding difficult tasks; the weakness of uncritically taking over variations or rules discovered by others; the vanity which is self-sufficient; the incapacity for admitting mistakes; in brief, everything that leas to standstill or to anarchy.

  Emanuel Lasker

  Mistake, Vanity, Self

  "Lasker's Manual of Chess". Book by Emanuel Lasker, Published in New York: Dover, p. 338, 1960.

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• Seemingly the most easy of crafts, drawing is the one which reveals most tellingly our incapacity to sustain true vision and our acquiescence to the ready-made.

  Rico Lebrun

  Drawing, Vision, Acquiescence

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• Nothing is more symptomatic of the enervation, of the decompression of the Western imagination, than our incapacity to respond to the landings on the Moon. Not a single great poem, picture, metaphor has come of this breathtaking act, of Prometheus' rescue of Icarus or of Phaeton in flight towards the stars.

  George Steiner

  Stars, Moon, Imagination

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• Many of us grow up thinking of mistakes as bad, viewing errors as evidence of fundamental incapacity. This negative thinking pattern can create a self-fulfilling prophecy, which undermines the learning process. To maximize our learning it is essential to ask: "How can we get the most from every mistake we make?"

  Tony Buzan

  Motivational, Growing Up, Mistake

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• Of course I constantly despair at my own incapacity, at the impossibility of ever accomplishing anything, of painting a valid, true picture or even knowing what such a thing ought to look like. But then I always have the hope that, if I persevere, it might one day happen. And this hope is nurtured every time something appears, a scattered, partial, initial hint of something which reminds me of what I long for, or which conveys a hint of it – although often enough I have been fooled by a momentary glimpse that then vanishes, leaving behind only the usual thing.

  Gerhard Richter

  Knowing, Long, Leaving

  Gerhard Richter, Dietmar Elger, Hans-Ulrich Obrist (2009). “Gerhard Richter: writings 1961-2007”, Distributed Art Pub Inc

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