"Ineptitude" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "O thou Inefficiency! Ineptitude garbed as woman! Must I then teach thee the elements of thy business? Hast thou not observed the pump? Go to it, and draw water. Cause the water to flow into buckets. Carry these buckets—need I go on? Will not Nature herself teach thee what ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... her mind to do this if there were a chance of its preventing the last scandal—a catastrophe to which she saw her sister rushing straight. That Selina was capable at a given moment of going off with her lover, and capable of it precisely because it was the greatest ineptitude as well as the greatest wickedness—there was a voice of prophecy, of warning, to this effect in the silent, empty house. If repeating to Lionel what she had seen would contribute to prevent anything, or to stave off the danger, was it not her duty to denounce his wife, flesh and blood ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... this afternoon," he answered, his nose in the air. "There will be plenty for a change of setts without me. I am not good enough for Binning and his two young aristocrats, and I don't choose to make sport for the Philistines by an exhibition of my ineptitude. I have no pretentious to ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... across the park who, not hav-ing room for her, had "come to an arrangement" with Miss Kentish for her accommodation at the boarding house; and with her fussiness, her nose pursuit, her humming and her general ineptitude of habit and of thought, she was as it were a fated companion for Rosalie; and it was the case that all the other inmates of the boarding house were, in regard to Rosalie, equally and in the same sense fated. Miss Salmon and they were fated, or fatal, to Rosalie, in the sense that it would ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... "If you desire a policy to be effected, elect men who will effect it." As a fact, these four departments had elected a group of men, of whom Laferre, the Grand Master of the Freemasons, is a good type, with his absorbing interest in the destruction of Christianity, and his ignorance and ineptitude in any other field than that ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... ineptitude, however, is the waste and atrophy of his best powers through disuse. Thus the early settlers of the Coachela Valley fought hunger and thirst while rivers of water ran away a few feet below the surface of ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... of the kind!" cried Goriot. "Aha! M. de Restaud, you could not make your wife happy; she has looked for happiness and found it elsewhere, and you make her suffer for your own ineptitude? He will have to reckon with me. Make yourself easy, Nasie. Aha! he cares about his heir! Good, very good. I will get hold of the boy; isn't he my grandson? What the blazes! I can surely go to see the ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... and when he did his humour was as like unto humour as water is like unto wine. Still, when a monarch jests, if you are wise, if you have a favour to sue, or a position at Court to seek or to maintain, you smile, for all that the ineptitude of his witless wit be ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... responsible for the consequences. In the face of its traditional policy and of utterances that came from Berlin the members of that Government can not plead a mere blunder. None the less, a great deal may have been due to sheer ineptitude in estimating human nature. How much this was so, or how much an immoral tradition had its natural results, we can not as yet fully tell, for we have not the whole of the records before us. No one disputes that we were bound to impose ...
— Before the War • Viscount Richard Burton Haldane
... full ineptitude of this conundrum only dawned upon me by degrees. Manifestly, if I understood banking, I might do some specialised kind of work for the Government. But in that case I would not apply to the Munitions. ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... because the age required more highly seasoned writing, the general taste in reading very much resembling "that of some particular Man in eating who would never willingly devour what doth not stink"; and partly from the ineptitude of the public to appreciate the ironic method. This latter passage is of interest as coming from the author of that great masterpiece in irony, Jonathan Wild. Fielding has observed, he tells us that "though Irony is capable of furnishing the most exquisite ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... the practice of inoculation met the same obstinate resistance as, more recently, that of vaccination startled the people. Thus objects of the highest importance to mankind, on their first appearance, are slighted and contemned. Posterity smiles at the ineptitude of the preceding age, while it becomes familiar with those objects which that age has so eagerly rejected. Time is a ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... hours and without the slightest hitch. It was a remarkable achievement—an achievement attributable in part to military foresight dating back to the days when Messrs. Asquith, Lloyd George, Churchill and Co., either deliberately or else as a result of sheer ignorance and ineptitude, were deceiving their countrymen as to the gravity of the German menace, an achievement attributable also in part to military administrative efficiency of a high order in a time of crisis. The Topographical Section, it should be added, ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... itself into comprehensive generalisations. But the excesses to which such a character is liable are, in him, prevented by a firm and watchful sense of propriety. His simplicity never degenerates into ineptitude or insipidity; his enthusiasm must be based on reason; he rarely suffers his love of the vast to betray him into toleration of the vague. The boy Schiller was extravagant; but the man admits no bombast in his style, no inflation in his thoughts or actions. He is the poet of truth; ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle |
