"Inept" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... searching than those of the philosophers, will this very day compel me to add a somewhat curious problem to those you have stated. I am wondering what the result will be when two 'lucks'—in other words, two unconsciousnesses, of which one is adroit and fortunate, the other inept and bungling—meet and in some measure blend in the same venture, the same undertaking? Which will triumph over the other? I soon shall know. This afternoon I propose to take a step that will be of supreme ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... is a disquisition on "Ugliness in Fiction." Probably the author of it has read "Liza of Lambeth," and said Faugh! The article, peculiarly inept, is one of those outpourings which every generation of artists has to suffer with what tranquillity it can. According to the Reviewer, ugliness is specially rife "just now." It is always "just now." It was "just now" when George Eliot wrote "Adam Bede," when George Moore wrote "A Mummer's ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... which it stole, the miserable high-flown lies which it told, might not be doing Italy a great service in accustoming it to modern institutions, in training it to warfare, in ridding it of a brood of inept little tyrants: such questions did not occur to Alfieri, for whom liberty meant everything, progress and improvement nothing. As the century drew to a close, and the futility of so many vaunted reforms, the hollowness of so many promises, became apparent to the ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... proceed from the Father through the Son. So also did Abel proceed immediately from Adam, inasmuch as Adam was his father; and mediately, as Eve was his mother, who proceeded from Adam; although, indeed, this example of a material procession is inept to signify the immaterial procession ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... becomes so misgoverned as to be not only a nuisance to the foreigner within its borders but a danger to its neighbours. Mexico is in such a phase to-day. And most of the aggressions and annexations of the modern period have arisen out of the inconveniences and reasonable fears caused by such an inept phase. I am a persistent advocate for the restoration of Poland, but at the same time it is very plain to me that it is a mere travesty of the facts to say that Poland, was a white lamb of a country torn to pieces by three wicked neighbours, Poland in the eighteenth century was a dangerous ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... again, mildly. This latest attempt to seize them or harm them—if it was that—had been surprisingly inept. It was strange that creatures able to travel between the stars and put regiments and tanks out of action should fail so dismally to kill or kidnap Coburn, if they really wanted to. Could it be that they were not quite sincere ...
— The Invaders • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... and claws showing, came back looking like an adventurous tomcat that wished only to hide itself meekly in its accustomed haunts; and its unobtrusive bearing seemed to say, the less said about the matter the better. What a storm of obloquy would have burst upon such inept diplomacy in America, or in England, or even in France. Not so here. Everybody was sore and sorry, but the newspapers and the journalists could raise no protest that counted. It is all explained by the fact that the people do not govern, ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... cry out to us, 'You know I was more skeptical about Smerdyakov than you, you remember that yourselves, but now I am convinced. He killed him, he must have done!' And for the present he falls back upon a gloomy and irritable denial. Impatience and anger prompted him, however, to the most inept and incredible explanation of how he looked into his father's window and how he respectfully withdrew. The worst of it was that he was unaware of the position of affairs, of the ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... of Lorris; the trouvere or jogleor, who sang, was a "viel caitif" when the Chartres glass was set up, and the Charlemagne window designed, about 1210, or perhaps a little later. When one is not a professor, one has not the right to make inept guesses, and, when one is not a critic, one should not risk confusing a difficult question by baseless assumptions; but even a summer tourist may without offence visit his churches in the order that suits him best; and, for our tour, "Aucassins" follows Christian and goes hand in hand with ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... rest, neighbor," she said, "since you have seen me yourself in that inept and ridiculous role of living advertisement, of fashionable lay-figure; and the result has been just as I expected. Can you find any one who believes in my honesty of purpose? You have heard Mme. Fortin to-night? Yourself, neighbor ...
— Other People's Money • Emile Gaboriau
... the whole equivocal and rather animal atmosphere oppressed him terribly, though it interested him: for he knew nothing like it. He was at sea in the conversations of the two little beasts, who talked of dress, and made silly jokes, and laughed in an inept way with their eyes shining with delight when they were off on the track of some spicy story. He was more at ease when Myrrha left them. When the two women were together it was like being in a foreign country without knowing ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... recommending the name Tacoma for the Territory, which was printed in the Washington Standard in January, 1866. This article should be reprinted by the State Historical Society, as it represents a movement of considerable force at one time against the inept and confusing name adopted for the State. The Indian evidence for the native name of the Mountain was collected in Wickersham: Is it "Mt. Tacoma" or "Mt. Rainier?", pamphlet, Tacoma, 1893. The argument ...
— The Mountain that was 'God' • John H. Williams
... after all, it is a nation of money-grubbers, ruled by a money-trust, where wealth is worshipped as no other nation worships rank; a nation without culture, without experience in world-politics, without self-control, loudly vain, inept, wasteful, childish—a nation, in other words, at the awkward age between ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... millions to save the nation from disruption, so, when peace came, it gave other brave men and braver women, and other unstinted millions to strengthen the hands which generations of slavery had left feeble and inept. Not only the colored, but the white also, were the recipients of this bounty. The Queen City of the Confederacy, the proud capital of the commonwealth of Virginia, saw the strange spectacle of her own white children gathered, for the first time, into free ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee |
