Incapable Man Quotes & Sayings

To pass its threshold was to return to stagnation; to cross the silent hall, to ascend the darksome staircase, to seek my own lonely little room, and then to meet tranquil Mrs. Fairfax, and spend the long winter evening with her, and her only, was to quell wholly the faint excitement wakened by my walk, - to slip again over my faculties the viewless fetters of an uniform and too still existence; of an existence whose very privileges of security and ease I was becoming incapable of appreciating. What good it would have done me at that time to have been tossed in the storms of an uncertain struggling life, and to have been taught by rough and bitter experience to long for the calm amidst which I now repined! Yes, just as much good as it would do a man tired of sitting still in a "too easy chair" to take a long walk: and just as natural was the wish to stir, under my circumstances, as it would be under his. — Charlotte Bronte

Just like a person has five senses, the Scripture also has Five Senses. First, there is the historical sense of Scripture. Second, there is a doctrinal sense of Scripture. Third, there is a prophetic sense of Scripture, fourth, there is a philosophical sense to Scripture, fifth, and there is a mystical sense to Scripture where events and persons symbolize truth. The Common Man is incapable of coming to the Scriptures and perceiving what is in it. We must have Grace given to us by Christ in order to understand the Bible. — Anya VonderLuft

When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental - men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost ... All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre ... — H.L. Mencken

What makes people hard-hearted is this, that each man has, or fancies he has, as much as he can bear in his own troubles. Hence, if a man suddenly finds himself in an unusually happy position, it will in most cases result in his being sympathetic and kind. But if he has never been in any other than a happy position, or this becomes his permanent state, the effect of it is often just the contrary: it so far removes him from suffering that he is incapable of feeling any more sympathy with it. So it is that the poor often show themselves more ready to help than the rich. — Arthur Schopenhauer

Brown and Dilke walked with me and back from the Christmas pantomime. I had not a dispute but a disquisition, with Dilke on various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason - Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration. — John Keats

Sadly, sadly, the sun rose; it rose upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their directed exercise, incapable of his own help and his own happiness, sensible of the blight on him, and resigning himself to let it eat him away. — Charles Dickens

The great educational value of the war against Christendom lies in the absolute truthlessness of the priest. Such purity is rare enough. The 'man of God' is entirely incapable of honesty, and only arises at the point where truth is defaced beyond all legibility. Lies are his entire metabolism, the air he breathes, his bread and his wine. He cannot comment upon the weather without a secret agenda of deceit. No word, gesture, or perception is slight enough to escape his extravagant reflex of falsification, and of the lies in circulation he will instinctively seize on the grossest, the most obscene and oppressive travesty. Any proposition passing the lips of a priest is necessarily totally false, excepting only insidiouses whose message is momentarily misunderstood. It is impossible to deny him without discovering some buried fragment or reality. — Nick Land

I believe that women have a capacity for understanding and compassion which man structurally does not have, does not have it because he cannot have it. He's just incapable of it. — Barbara Jordan

He has suffered a great deal and is still suffering from the idea that he could make a theory, but was incapable of boldly overstepping the law, and so he is not a man of genius. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

It is a joke to me that this man should have presented himself as an ardent conservationist, since so many of the companies he served as a director or in which he was a major stockholder were notorious damagers of the water or the soil or the atmosphere. But it wasn't a joke to *MacIntosh, who had come into this world incapable of caring much about anything. So, in order to hide this deficiency, he had become a great actor, pretending even to himself that he cared passionately about all sorts of things. With — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. — Thomas Jefferson

I can't imagine living the way he does - always keeping track of who gave me what and what I should give them in return, incapable of love or loyalty or forgiveness, a one-eyed man with a knife in hand, looking for someone else's eye to poke out. That isn't life. It's some paler version of life. I wonder where he learned it from. — Veronica Roth

IV The bounded is loathed by its possessor. The same dull round even of a universe would soon become a mill with complicated wheels.
V If the many become the same as the few, when possess'd, More! More! is the cry of a mistaken soul, less than All cannot satisfy Man.
VI If any could desire what he is incapable of possessing, despair must be his eternal lot.
VII The desire of Man being Infinite the possession is Infinite & himself Infinite. — William Blake

Perhaps the most incapable Executive that ever filled the presidential chair ... it would be difficult to imagine a man less fit to guide the state with honor and safety through the stormy times that marked the opening of the present century. — Theodore Roosevelt

If the European grows accustomed not to rule, a generation and a half will be sufficient to bring the old continent, and the whole world along with it, into mortal inertia, intellectual sterility, universal barbarism. It is only the illusion of rule, and the discipline of responsibility which it entails, that can keep Western minds in tension. Science, art, technique, and all the rest live on the tonic atmosphere created by the consciousness of authority. If this is lacking, the European will gradually become degraded. Minds will no longer have the radical faith in themselves which impels them, energetic, daring, tenacious, towards the capture of great new ideas in every order of life. The European will inevitably become a day-to-day man. Incapable of creative, specialized effort, he will always be falling back on yesterday, on custom, on routine. He will turn into a commonplace, conventional, empty creature, like the Greeks of the decadence and those of the Byzantine epoch. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

Whether many people realize it yet or not, man, the Inferior Animal, has by now proved himself incapable of keeping his own species - and others - alive for very much longer. So the earth has begun its own plan to set things right. — Benjamin Hoff

For after all what is man in nature? A nothing in relation to infinity, all in relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all and infinitely far from understanding either. The ends of things and their beginnings are impregnably concealed from him in an impenetrable secret. He is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness out of which he was drawn and the infinite in which he is engulfed. — Blaise Pascal

Profound silence would brood over the valley, even weighing down our spirits with indefinable heaviness. There can be no other place in the world where man feels himself so alone, so isolated, so completely ignored by nature, so incapable of entering into communion with her — David Oliver Relin

I don't know how to be myself. It's like I'm permanently outside myself. Like, like you could push your hands straight through me if you wanted to. And I can see the type of man I want to be versus the type of man I actually am and I know that I'm doing it but I'm incapable of what needs to be done. I'm like Pinocchio, a wooden boy. Not a real boy. And it kills me. — Richard Ayoade

It seems to me that a man who is incapable of humor is capable of cruelty. — Bette Greene

Lord Beaverbrook was fundamentally a lonely man, with a low sense of his own self-worth, who was incapable of forming a stable, loving relationship with anyone. He could charm or he could bully; he could give or he could take; he was glad to see his guests arrive and pleased to see them go. Although many people genuinely loved him, he was incapable of believing that this was either possible or true. No wonder he was so restless, so impatient, so vindictive, so quick to lose his temper, so eager to stir things up. — David Cannadine

Are you ruled by a heart that foolishly imprinted on the wrong man? Like most humans, are you incapable of change? Change requires an admission of error. Your race devotes itself to justifying its errors, not correcting them."

"My heart hasn't imprinted on anyone."

"Good. Then it may yet be mine. — Karen Marie Moning

A man is biologically incapable of giving 'the look'. — Fennel Hudson

The moral victory itself may not be so moral after all, not only because suffering often has a narcissistic aspect to it, but also because it renders the victim superior, that is, better than his enemy. Yet no matter how evil your enemy is, the crucial thing is that he is human; and although incapable of loving another like ourselves, we nonetheless know that evil takes root when one man starts to think that he is better than another. — Joseph Brodsky

When I see the blind and wretched state of men, when I survey the whole universe in its deadness, and man left to himself with no light, as though lost in this corner of the universe without knowing who put him there, what he has to do, or what will become of him when he dies, incapable of knowing anything, I am moved to terror, like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying desert island, who wakes up quite lost, with no means of escape. Then I marvel that so wretched a state does not drive people to despair. — Blaise Pascal

He's the sort of man who wants power. He doesn't have it, but he thinks he's entitled to it by birthright. He's incapable of earning what he wants, so he wants what he hasn't earned. The sort of man who, if he wants something, thinks it's all right to take it. — Laura Lee Guhrke

A man described by authorities as one evolutionary step above a banana slug has recently admitted to having been locked in the Sacajawea Junior High biology lab over a long weekend nearly sixteen years ago when he fell asleep and was mistaken as a cadaver. Though the man is incapable of human speech, he was able, over a period of weeks, to chisel out his story in hieroglyphics on the bathroom wall of the insane asylum where he now resides. He claims that toward the end of the second day of his accidental captivity, he got downright lonely and sought companionship at his own intellectual level. He found that companionship in a petri dish. — Chris Crutcher

Unless the will is free, man has no freedom; and if he has no freedom he is not a moral agent, that is, he is incapable of moral action and also of moral character. — Charles Grandison Finney

Here Calvin is appreciating the way God blesses all those who are made in his image. Yet just prior to this, Calvin also writes that while "in man's perverted and degenerate nature some sparks still gleam, [the light is nonetheless] choked with dense ignorance, so that it cannot come forth effectively. [His] mind, because of its dullness . . . betrays how incapable it is of seeking and finding truth."173 — Timothy J. Keller

It is only by the exercise of reason that man can discover God. Take away that reason, and he would be incapable of understanding anything; and, in this case, it would be just as consistent to read even the book called the Bible to a horse as to a man. How, then, is it that those people pretend to reject reason? — Thomas Paine

The first virtue of a young man today - that is, for the next fifty years perhaps, as long as we live in fear, and religion has regained its powers - is to be incapable of enthusiasm and not to have much in the way of brains. — Stendhal

They're your family. Anyone can see that you love them.
He stills as if he's absorbing my words. "Most people believe I'm incapable of feeling anything."
Outrage punches through my chest like a burning fist. In that moment, I know I'd go to war for this man. Even if he hated every second of it. No one should have to face the world without someone at their back. Especially not someone as dedicated as Gabriel. — Kristen Callihan

Man often becomes what he believes himself to be. If I keep on saying to myself that I cannot do a certain thing, it is possible that I may end by really becoming incapable of doing it. On the contrary, if I have the belief that I can do it, I shall surely acquire the capacity to do it even if I may not have it at the beginning. — Mahatma Gandhi

What a man really says when he says that someone else can be persuaded by force, is that he himself is incapable of more rational means of communication. — Norman Cousins

He would roam about the world carrying his recollections with him, and perhaps some day he would come to forget them, for one can live only by forgetting; but when his grief should dissolve with the years he would be left an empty man, like a smiling automaton, incapable of any affections other than meterial ones. — Vicente Blasco Ibanez

Humor is a developed sense, stemming basically from cruelty. The more primitive a mind, the less selectivity exists. ... A man slips on a banana peel and breaks his back. The adult stops laughing at that point, the child does not. And a civilized ego finds embarrassment as acutely distressing as physical pain. A baby, a child, a moron is incapable of practicing empathy. He cannot identify himself with another individual. He is regrettably autistic; his own rules are arbitrary — Lewis Padgett

I accept this award today with an abiding faith in America and an audacious faith in the future of mankind. I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history. I refuse to accept the idea that the "isness" of man's present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal "oughtness" that forever confronts him. I refuse to accept the idea that man is mere flotsom and jetsom in the river of life, unable to influence the unfolding events which surround him. I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality. — Martin Luther King Jr.

You are not barred from attaining greatness by heredity. No matter who or what your ancestors may have been or how unlearned or lowly their station, the upward way is open for you. There is no such thing as inheriting a fixed mental position; no matter how small the mental capital we receive from our parents, it may be increased; no man is incapable of growth. — Wallace D. Wattles

It is not for man to seek, or even to believe in, God.
He only has to refuse his ultimate love to everything that is not God.
This refusal does not presuppose any belief.
It is enough to recognize what is obvious to any mind:
that all the goods of this world, past, present, and future, real or imaginary,
are finite and limited and radically incapable of satisfying
the desire that perpetually burns within us
for an infinite and perfect good. — Simone Weil

A tender-hearted and compassionate disposition, which inclines men to pity and feel the misfortunes of others, and which is, even for its own sake, incapable of involving any man in ruin and misery, is of all tempers of mind the most amiable; and though it seldom receives much honor, is worthy of the highest. — Henry Fielding

I remained standing in the middle of the room, swaying on my feet as though I had received a blow. I thought of my life and saw what it had been. No one could swim against such a current of mud. I had been a man so horrible that he could have no friend. But wasn't that, I asked myself, because I had always been incapable of wearing a disguise? If all men went through life with unmasked faces, as I had done for half a century, one might be surprised to find how little difference there was between them. But, in fact, no one lives with his face uncovered, no one. Most men ape greatness or nobility. Though they do not know it, they conform to certain fixed types, literary or other. This the saints know, and they hate and despise themselves because they see themselves with unclouded eyes. I should not have been so universally condemned had I not been so defenseless, so open, and so naked. — Francois Mauriac

Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.1 Pascal — David Eagleman

You wouldn't believe it, but apart from a few drunks, a few sex murderers and other men who get into the papers where they are designated as criminals of passion, no normal man with normal drives has the obvious idea that a normal woman would like to be quite normally raped. Part of it is that men aren't normal, but people are incapable of even imagining all the ramifications of the male disease, so accustomed have they become to men's mistakes in judgment and their phenomenal lack of instinct. — Ingeborg Bachmann

What is the secret mesmerism which friendship possesses, and under the operation of which a person ordinarily sluggish, or cold, or timid, becomes wise, active, and resolute, in another's behalf? As Alexis, after a few passes from Dr. Elliotson, despises pain, reads with the back of his head, sees miles off, looks into next week, and performs other wonders, of which, in his own private normal condition, he is quite incapable; so you see, in the affairs of the world and under the magnetism of friendships, the modest man becomes bold, the shy confident, the lazy active, or the impetuous prudent and peaceful. What — William Makepeace Thackeray

Lora followed his eyes to the subject of their conversation. He was such a masculine man, tall and strong and sure of himself, cocky almost. A male chauvinist to his toenails, she suspected, as incapable of admitting to feeling hurt and lonely and afraid as a pig was of flying. But he was vulnerable too, enormously vulnerable. More than many people who openly asked for it, he needed love. He needed someone to hold him in her arms and convince him that what he had done was not so bad, was not unforgivable, did not put him beyond the pale of normal society. To convince him that he was lovable. And loved. And she meant to be that someone. — Karen Robards

Through neglect of this rule, many men of genius and great scholars have become weak-minded and childish, or even gone quite mad, as they grew old. To take no other instances, there can be no doubt that the celebrated English poets of the early part of this century, Scott, Wordsworth, Southey, became intellectually dull and incapable towards the end of their days, nay, soon after passing their sixtieth year; and that their imbecility can be traced to the fact that, at that period of life, they were all led on? by the promise of high pay, to treat literature as a trade and to write for money. This seduced them into an unnatural abuse of their intellectual powers; and a man who puts his Pegasus into harness, and urges on his Muse with the whip, will have to pay a penalty similar to that which is exacted by the abuse of other kinds of power. And — Arthur Schopenhauer

Theoretically, great opportunities lay ahead of a young man of energy in that day and place, but Carl Miller had been incapable of establishing either with his superiors or his subordinates the reputation for approximate immutability which is essential to success in a hierarchic industry. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Through relationship with God, man is finally capable of doing that which he was incapable of doing on his own. That's what walking in the Spirit is all about. — Lysa TerKeurst

Above, far above the prejudices and passions of men soar the laws of nature. Eternal and immutable, they are the expression of the creative power they represent what is, what must be, what otherwise could not be. Man can come to understand the: he is incapable of changing them. — Vilfredo Pareto

Psychic disturbances are the consequences of the sexual chaos of society. For thousands of years, this chaos has had the function of psychically subjecting man to the prevailing conditions of existence, of internalizing the external mechanization of life. It has served to bring about the psychic anchoring of a mechanized and authoritarian civilization by making man incapable of functioning independently. — Wilhelm Reich

And thus ever works the pallid academic mind, denying the real, exalting the fictitious and the false, incapable of adjusting itself to the flow of living things, to the reality and the pathos of man's follies, to the valiant hope that ever causes him to aspire, and again to aspire; that never lifts a hand in aid because it cannot . . . when what the world needs is courage, common sense and human sympathy, and a moral standard that is plain, valid and livable. — Sarah Vowell

Everything exists; nothing exists. Either formula affords a like serenity. The man of anxiety, to his misfortune, remains between them, trembling and perplexed, forever at the mercy of a nuance, incapable of gaining a foothold in the security of being or in the absence of being. — Emil Cioran

If I have sinned so much, if I have been since then so solitary, if my soul has taken such a swirling and solitary movement, if I have doubted everyting, if I have been fatalist and have been a pessimistic child who awaits death every day and who almost seeks it out, if I have opened myself slowly and late to happiness, and if I am still a somber man incapable of laughing wholeheartedly it is because you left me ... — Malcolm Gladwell

Blake Riley is a better man than anyone gives him credit for. And I'm ashamed of myself. I'm so fucking ashamed for ever believing that he was just a stupid jock who was incapable of being serious. — Sarina Bowen

Jorge Luis Borges understood this. In a fantasy short story published in 1942, "Funes the Memorious," he described a man, Ireneo Funes, who found after an accident that he could remember absolutely everything. He could reconstruct every day in the smallest detail, and he could even later reconstruct the reconstruction, but he was incapable of understanding. Borges wrote, "To think is to forget details, generalize, make abstractions. In the teeming world of Funes there were only details. — Stephen M. Stigler

Even when I worked in that world, I still wanted love so strong that the man would have no interest in another woman. Maybe you will always be incapable of giving that kind of love. You tell me I want too much. And maybe I do. But like you and your imagination, I can't help but be that way. — Amy Tan

That's one reason why a civil war is worse than any other sort. When two parties in a given country resort to arms to settle political differences, every man is a potential enemy to every other man, and the distinction between legalized killing and murder is not clearly drawn in the minds of average men, who are incapable of sustained thought. Death is held to be a fitting reward for those who dare hold contrary views, and a nation involved in a civil war is a breeding ground for children reared to look with tolerance on next to nothing but violence. — Kenneth Roberts

I refuse to accept the idea that the 'is-ness' of a man's present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the 'ought-ness' that forever confronts him. — Martin Luther King Jr.

It [predatory capitalism] is incapable of meeting human needs that can be expressed only in collective terms, and its concept of competitive man who seeks only to maximize wealth and power, who subjects himself to market relationships, to exploitation and external authority, is antihuman and intolerable in the deepest sense. — Noam Chomsky

Seurity!" I yelled. "I'm being harassed!"

Security officers swarm around me and one orders me to step inside the small office area.

"What's the problem here?" the man behind the desk asks the TSA officer.

"She's harassing me, and I feel that I'm being discriminated against because of my intelligence level," I say.

The man looks at me. "What?"

"This woman attempted to engage me in idiotic conversation and I'm psychologically incapable of reacting in a positive way to such foolishness and we had an altercation after she threatened to throw away my ChapStick. — Stephanie McAfee

A woman ... always feels herself complimented by love, though it may be from a man incapable of winning her heart, or perhaps even her esteem. — Abel Stevens

Goals incapable of attainment have driven many a man to despair, but despair is easier to get to than that
one need merely look out of the window, for example. — Donald Barthelme

If I am still a somber man, incapable of laughing whole-heartedly, — Malcolm Gladwell

He says nothing. Not because he disagrees, or disapproves, but because he's crying. Faintly I hear my father sniffling and wiping away tears, and I know he's proud, just incapable of expressing it. I can't fault the man for not knowing how to say what's in his heart. It's the family curse. — Andre Agassi

The line in the sand was drawn. A man did not sleep with his friend, especially not a man like him, one utterly incapable of caring for a woman outside of the bedroom. He couldn't treat Cass that way. He would not touch the friend. No licking the friend, either. If he could get away with not looking at her, he'd do it. — Dee Tenorio

I am black; I am in total fusion with the world, in sympathetic affinity with the earth, losing my id in the heart of the cosmos
and the white man, however intelligent he may be, is incapable of understanding Louis Armstrong or songs from the Congo. I am black, not because of a curse, but because my skin has been able to capture all the cosmic effluvia. I am truly a drop of sun under the earth. — Frantz Fanon

But the man we are now analysing accustoms himself not to appeal from his own to any authority outside him. He is satisfied with himself exactly as he is. Ingenuously, without any need of being vain, as the most natural thing in the world, he will tend to consider and affirm as good everything he finds within himself: opinions, appetites, preferences, tastes. Why not, if, as we have seen, nothing and nobody force him to realise that he is a second-class man, subject to many limitations, incapable of creating or conserving that very organisation which gives his life the fullness and contentedness on which he bases this assertion of his personality? — Ortega Y Gasset

And there it is! Bravo! I knew it was only a matter of time before Byron realized he had an audience. That man is simply incapable of keeping his shirt on when there are spectators. One Christmas Eve, he stripped his shirt off right in the middle of the choir's rendition of Oh Child of Bethlehem. Coincidentally, the next song was Come Let Us Adore Him and the imbecile actually launched into some interpretive dance. — Kirt J. Boyd

Original sin is that thing about man which makes him capable of conceiving of his own perfection and incapable of achieving it. — Reinhold Niebuhr

There are barbarians who seize this dog, who so prodigiously surpasses man in friendship, and nail him down to a table, and dissect him alive to show you the mezaraic veins ... Answer me, Machinist, has Nature really arranged all the springs of feeling in this animal to the end that he might not feel? Has he nerves that he may be incapable of suffering? — Voltaire

He was utterly incapable of resisting the maneuvers of the mealy-mouthed scoundrel that the Neapolitan Vincentian, Bugnini,77 a man as bereft of culture as he was of basic honesty, soon revealed himself to be. Even — Louis Bouyer

The modern Presidents Club was founded by two men who by all rights should have loathed each other. There was Harry Truman, the humble haberdasher from Missouri, hurled into office in the spring of 1945, summoning to the White House Herbert Hoover, a failed Republican president who had left town thirteen years earlier as the most hated man in America, his motorcades pelted with rotten fruit. They were political enemies and temperamental opposites. Where Truman was authentic, amiable, if prone to eruptions of temper, Hoover could be cold, humorless, incapable of small talk but ferociously sure of the rightness of his cause. — Nancy Gibbs

I realized that the childish impression I had always had of my father, as Just Lawgiver, was entirely wrong. We were utterly dependent on this man, who was not only deluded and ignorant, but incompetent in every way. What was more, I knew that my mother was incapable of standing up to him. It was like walking into the cockpit of an airplane and finding the pilot and co-pilot passed out drunk in their seats. And standing outside the Lyceum, I was struck with a black, incredulous horror, which in fact was not at all unlike the horror I had felt at twelve, sitting on a bar stool in our sunny little kitchen in Plano. Who is in control here? I thought, dismayed. Who is flying this plane? — Donna Tartt

the most significant consequence of Adam's and Eve's sin was the immediate loss of intimacy with Yahweh. To restore what was lost, God had to become our Redeemer and Savior. Although Adam and Eve created a wide separation between God and the human race, man is incapable of bridging the gap. Yahweh had to do that Himself. — Neil Snyder

We have ministers who are incapable of doing what has been ordered from above because there is no follow up, because there are no consequences. If you are poor man and you steal, your hand is cut off after three offences. But if you are a rich man, nobody will say anything to you. — Basmah Bint Saud

I know I am incapable of courage unless I have decided to give my life. Without that choice, there is nothing but flight. But you take such a decision on the spur of the moment and you cannot make it last for weeks and months. The mental effort is too great. Hence the rarity of true courage. We generally accept a kind of lame compromise between the destiny and the man, which reason rejects. — Gabriel Chevallier

A man without tea in him is incapable of understanding truth and beauty. — Okakura Kakuzo

If a dog on a leash does not run off, no one will regard him as a loyal companion on the basis of this fact alone. No reasonable individual will speak of love if a man sleeps with a defenseless woman who is virtually chained hand and feet. No one, unless he is a real scoundrel, will be proud of a woman's love gained by financial support or by power. No decent person will accept love that is not given voluntarily. The compulsory morality of marital obligations and familial authority is a morality of cowards and impotent people who are afraid of life, people who are incapable of experiencing, through the power of natural love, what they try to produce for themselves with the help of marital laws and the police. — Wilhelm Reich

Rationally considered, nothing can be more absurd than the baptism of infants under any circumstances. No statement, no matter by whom it may be said to have been uttered, can make that true which is radically false. If an innocent child, unconscious of good or evil, irresponsible to God and man, incapable of thought or action, is not already, in accordance with Christian theology, a member of Christ, then no vicarious promise or priestly ablution can make him one. For if this were so, a similar ceremony under devil worship could make him a member of Satan. — Tennessee Celeste Claflin

Allow me to inquire how man can control his own affairs when he is not only incapable of compiling a plan for some laughably short term such as, say, a thousand years, but cannot even predict what will happen to him tomorrow? — Mikhail Bulgakov

The ... problem that confronts homosexuals is that they set out to win the love of a "real" man. If they succeed, they fail. A man who "goes with" other men is not what they would call a real man. The conundrum is incapable of resolution, but that does not make homosexuals give it up. — Quentin Crisp

Now he was nothing to her, just a lesson in time, a wicked boy-man, incapable of wealth or prestige. — Coco J. Ginger

Knowledge, understanding, and wisdom is naught to the man who is incapable of applying it. — Joshua Romqn

You can't blame me. I mean that literally. You're incapable of blaming me. You're human. Being human is choosing freedom over imprisonment, autonomy over dependency, liberty over servitude. You can't blame me because you know (come on, man, you've always known) that the idea of spending eternity with nothing to do except praise God is utterly unappealing. You'd be catatonic after an hour. Heaven's a swiz because to get in you have to leave yourself outside. You can't blame me because
now do please be honest with yourself for once
you'd have left, too. — Glen Duncan

The sensation was part of the general strangeness that made him feel like a man waking from a long sleep to find himself in an unknown country among people of alien tongue. We live in our own souls as in an unmapped region, a few acres of which we have cleared for our habitation; while of the nature of those nearest us we know but the boundaries that march with ours. Of the points in his wife's character not in direct contact with his own, Glennard now discerned his ignorance; and the baffling sense of her remoteness was intensified by the discovery that, in one way, she was closer to him than ever before. As one may live for years in happy unconsciousness of the possession of a sensitive nerve, he had lived beside his wife unaware that her individuality had become a part of the texture of his life, ineradicable as some growth on a vital organ; and he now felt himself at once incapable of forecasting her judgment and powerless to evade its effects. — Edith Wharton

There is a saying that only the man who has already committed a crime and repented of it is incapable of that crime; to be free of an erroneous opinion, I myself might add, one must at some time have professed it. — Jorge Luis Borges

Barrons's hold tightened further. "Give me one good reason not to kill him. Ms. Lane," he growled roughly around thick, long black fangs. "Because I asked you not to, Barrons. That's good enough. You killed the other princes, and I was grateful. I wasn't ready then. I was still afraid of what I'd become. But this last prince is mine to kill or not to kill. And I say no. At the moment. And although Cruce is incapable of understanding that word, I know you know that a no from me means no. And you will honor it," I said in a voice that brooked no resistance. It was one of the defining differences between the two proud, dark, violent males. And if he didn't honor it, he wasn't the man I believed he was. — Karen Marie Moning

A man's capable of understanding anything - how the ether vibrates, and what's going on in the sun - but how any other man can blow his nose differently from him, that he's incapable of understanding. — Ivan Turgenev

He knew damn well that no one could possibly love her as completely as he once had. Even the man he was today was incapable of that depth of emotion and connection. She'd killed the innocence in him that had made it possible to love a woman without any thought of self-preservation. He'd been wide open when she cut his heart out and scars had formed, creating a thick shield that he couldn't get past and no woman could get through. — Sylvia Day

To be a warrior a man has to be, first of all, and rightfully so, keenly aware of his own death. But to be concerned with death would force any one of us to focus on the self and that would be debilitating. So the next thing one needs to be a warrior is detachment. The idea of imminent death, instead of becoming an obsession, becomes an indifference.
Now you must detach yourself; detach yourself from everything. Only the idea of death makes a man sufficiently detached so he is incapable of abandoning himself to anything. Only the idea of death makes a man sufficiently detached so he can't deny himself anything. A man of that sort, however, does not crave, for he has acquired a silent lust for life and for all things of life. He knows his death is stalking him and won't give him time to cling to anything, so he tries, without craving, all of everything. — Carlos Castaneda

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience. — George Bernard Shaw

If man studied himself, he would see how incapable he is of going further. — Blaise Pascal

I've always liked that name. She looks like an Estella." A catch in his voice. She looks like a bald, old man to me, but I nod. I am incapable of saying no to my husband, so it looks like the kid just got screwed. — Tarryn Fisher

That man is richest who, having perfected the functions of his own life to the utmost, has also the widest helpful influence, both personal, and by means of his possessions, over the lives of others ... Many of the persons commonly considered wealthy are, in reality, no more wealthy than the locks of their own strong boxes, they being inherently and eternally incapable of wealth. — Alain De Botton

Nature understands no jesting; she is always true, always serious, always severe; she is always right, and the errors and faults are always those of man. The man incapable of appreciating her, she despises; and only to the apt, the pure, and the true, does she resign herself and reveal her secrets. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The most innocent man, pressed by the awful solemnities of public accusation and trial, many be incapable of supporting his own cause. He may be utterly unfit to cross-examine the witnesses against him, to point out the contradictions or defects of their testimony. And to counteract it by properly introducing it and applying his own. — William Rawle

My mind is incapable of conceiving such a thing as a soul. I may be in error, and man may have a soul; but I simply do not believe it. — Thomas A. Edison

Organizations like the church or General Motors promote a man up and up until he reaches a spot which he is obviously incapable of filling, and there they lay him to rest. — James A. Michener

I cannot describe to you the despairing sensation of trying to do something for a man who seems incapable or unwilling to do anything further for himself. — Lord Byron

I do not believe in God, but I believe God is man's greatest idea. Those incapable of religious feeling or those (like hard-core gay activists) who profane sacred ground do not have the imagination to educate the young. ... Until the left comes to its senses about the cultural power of religion, the right will continue to broaden its appeal — Camille Paglia