"Ineptitude" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... experiences which have moulded and hardened the individual units of other races, the Filipinos have, as a race, received an artificial impetus which tends to deceive them as to their own capacity, and to increase their aggregate self-confidence, while the results of personal ineptitude are ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... speaker. Yet at any given dinner the orator who passes out mere elocution to his hearers has a success almost as instant and splendid as his clowning brother. It is amazing what things people will applaud when they have the courage of one another's ineptitude. They will listen, after dinner, to anything but reason. They prefer also the old speakers to new ones; they like the familiar taps of humor, of eloquence; if they have tasted the brew before, they know what they are going to get. The note of their mood is tolerance, but tolerance ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... deep sense of shame that the only records allowed to stand in the long, low-latticed room in which the boy Shakespeare probably saw a play first acted, are boards recording the names of school football and cricket teams. The ineptitude of such a proceeding, the hideous insistence of the athletic craze of England, drew from me a despairing smile; but I think that Shakespeare himself would have viewed it with tolerance and ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... anything of the sort. It is the prevalence of the representative element, I suppose, that makes the man in the street so sure that he knows a good picture when he sees one. For I have noticed that in matters of architecture, pottery, textiles, &c., ignorance and ineptitude are more willing to defer to the opinions of those who have been blest with peculiar sensibility. It is a pity that cultivated and intelligent men and women cannot be induced to believe that a great gift of aesthetic appreciation ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... does, that during the month that I have been in Nantes you have never ceased to give me reason to complain of you. I have summoned you to meet me here that you may justify yourselves, if you can, for your ineptitude!" And he flung himself into the chair, drawing his fur-lined coat about him. "Let me hear from ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... (guards) of that suburb, hoping thereby to convince General Blanco that the rebellion was in full cry, consequent on his folly. No doubt, by this trick of the friars, many civilian Spaniards were deceived into an honest belief in the ineptitude of the Gov.-General. In a state of frenzy a body of them, headed by Father Mariano Gil, marched to the palace of Malacanan to demand an explanation of General Blanco. The gates were closed by order ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... inability, disability; disablement, impuissance, imbecility; incapacity, incapability; inaptitude, ineptitude, incompetence, unproductivity[obs3]; indocility[obs3]; invalidity, disqualification; inefficiency, wastefulness. telum imbelle[Lat], brutum fulmen[Lat], blank, blank cartridge, flash in the pan, vox et proeterea nihil[Lat], dead letter, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... the odor of virtue, but with an oracular wink in his eye, says in a descriptive note that it is to be played in the spirit of parody (parodistisch). Unfortunately the audience cannot see the printed direction, and there is no parody in music except extravagance and ineptitude in the utterance of simple things (like the faulty notes of the horns in Mozart's joke on the village musicians, the cadenza for violin solo in the same musical joke, or the twangling of Beckmesser's lute); ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... and magnificent; their intellect, rising into refined abstractions, stretching 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. ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... sniff an editor here, I think, but I am not sure. There's a similar touch of ineptitude (senility, perhaps) in the Memorabilia, ad fin. On the other hand I can imagine Xenophon purring over this ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... at the luxury of her two established and wealthy companions. Simply dressed in white cashmere trimmed with blue, her head had been dressed with real flowers by a coiffeur of the old-fashioned school, whose awkward hands had unconsciously given the charm of ineptitude to her fair hair. Still unaccustomed to any finery, she showed the timidity—to use a hackneyed phrase —inseparable from a first appearance. She had come from Valognes to find in Paris some use for her ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... the eternity of misery. But on that evening many of my audience were untaught in the rudiments of ultimate thought, and some were still sceptical of the bona fides of our purpose, and our power to achieve its object. To them, in their then ineptitude, what I shall say now would have been unintelligible. For in the same way that the waves of light or sound exceeding a certain maximum can not be transferred to the brain by dull eyes and ears, my thought pulsations ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... current of events and is absolutely a cypher." Nor would the court forego its crooked ways. "The queen is even more imprudent," Morris writes in 1791, "and the whole court is given up to petty intrigues worthy only of footmen and chambermaids." Moreover, in its amazing ineptitude, the monarchy had already toyed with republicanism by lending active military support to the revolutionists in America, at a cost to the already over-burdened treasury ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... The ineptitude of Congress is explained when we recall that it was a revolutionary body which indeed controlled foreign affairs and the issues of war and peace, coined money, and put forth paper money but had no general powers. Each State had but one vote, and thus a small and sparsely settled ...
— Washington and his Comrades in Arms - A Chronicle of the War of Independence • George Wrong
... of regret and sorrow that had followed upon his coming to America struck him with nausea. The thought of his long ineptitude for the life which he had adopted voluntarily gave him a feeling of self-contempt. The inertness ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton
... overlooked, but one has only to turn to almost any of the current standard translations of foreign songs to see that the matter is worse than this. To expect a student to get up and participate in this verbal foolishness and ineptitude, by endeavouring to express as genuine the balderdash that poses as sentiment and sense, is an insult to ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... mortar from a muddy spot, would hardly be a task beyond his powers. He might very well collaborate, at least as labourer; he could at least gather together the materials for the more intelligent mother to place in position. The true motive of his idleness is ineptitude. ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... its ineptitude. To receive as so much ready money and coin of good alloy, all those "I swear" of the official commons; not even to think that every scruple has been overcome, and that there cannot be in them all one single word of pure metal! He is both a prince and a traitor! To set the example from ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo |
