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More "Impotent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... from their windows, gazed on the huge watery masses breaking beneath their eyes, they could not but admire the magnificent spectacle of the ocean in its impotent fury. The waves rebounded in dazzling foam, the beach entirely disapppearing under the raging flood, and the cliff appearing to emerge from the sea itself, the spray rising to a height of more than a ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... on, "hitherto the police have remained impotent, and justice has been disarmed, in presence of a number of serious cases of crime, committed recently and still unsolved. Let me recall these cases to your memory: they were the murder of the Marquise de Langrune at her chateau of Beaulieu; the robberies from Mme. Van den ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... soul-confusing labyrinths of speculative radicalism." The radicalism that we hear much about today, is not Emerson's kind—but of thinner fiber—it qualifies itself by going to A "root" and often cutting other roots in the process; it is usually impotent as dynamite in its cause and sometimes as harmful to the wholesome progress of all causes; it is qualified by its failure. But the Radicalism of Emerson plunges to all roots, it becomes greater than itself—greater than all its formal or informal ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... know the worst; but we know that in three campaigns, we have done nothing, and suffered much. You may swell every expense, accumulate every assistance, and extend your traffic to the shambles of every German despot; your attempts will be forever vain and impotent—doubly so, indeed, from this mercenary aid on which you rely; for it irritates, to an incurable resentment, the minds of your adversaries, to over run them with the mercenary sons of rapine and plunder, devoting them and their possessions to the rapacity ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... a great horse; to arm and prepare ourselves to go with Mars and Bellona into the field was our sport and pastime; coaches and caroches we left unto them for whom they were first invented, for ladies and gentlemen, and decrepit age and impotent people." ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... leading actors in this political drama. Behind the lines, in the "offing," was the Insurgent Group, young men like Mark Sullivan and John Treacy of Hudson, stout defenders of the liberal wing in the Convention, feeling sullen, beaten, and hopelessly impotent against the mass attack of the machine forces. What a political medley was present in this convention—plebeian and patrician, machine man and political idealist—all gathered together and fighting as leading characters ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... is to say, exactly two years before Joan of Arc was born in Domremy. My family had fled to those distant regions from the neighborhood of Paris in the first years of the century. In politics they were Armagnacs—patriots; they were for our own French King, crazy and impotent as he was. The Burgundian party, who were for the English, had stripped them, and done it well. They took everything but my father's small nobility, and when he reached Neufchateau he reached it in poverty and with a broken spirit. But the political atmosphere there was ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... his boss. And when they had passed, the tent began to belch forth men who walked with heads and shoulders a little bent, talking together under their breaths of this man who dared defy the Committee to its face, and whose daring was as impotent as the breeze that still pulled at the flapping corner of the cloth sign over the door of ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... . . I can see how naturally you spoke of Jeff. Davis as you did, and you did not say a word more than he deserved. Still, he scarcely deserves to be brought into notice. He was not only a conspirator, but a traitor. His reply was a specimen of impotent rage. It is scarcely worth your notice, nor should you dignify it by a direct rejoinder. A clear, strong statement of the historical facts that justified the use of the word 'conspirator,' which you know very well how to write, is all the notice required. Do not attempt to fortify it by an ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... less than that of his ill-fated rival, knowing nothing of the tragedy, hearing nothing of the screams of warning from the crowd, came another racer. The frightened throng saw the coming of a second tragedy. The sound that came from the crowd was a low moaning, a sighing, impotent, unconscious prayer of the thousands for the mercy that could not come. The second motorcycle struck the wreck, leaped into the air, and the body of its rider shot fifty feet over the handlebars and fell at the bottom of ...
— Psychology and Achievement • Warren Hilton
... attack, and suddenly throwing his vigorous arms about the body of his adversary, compelled him to struggle for his own safety. It was then that he uttered cries more dreadful than before; and as he writhed about in all the agitations of pain and madness, he gnashed his terrible teeth with impotent attempts to bite, while the blood and foam which issued from his jaws rendered his figure still more horrible than before. But Sophron, with undaunted courage, still maintained his hold, and grasping him with irresistible strength, prevented him from using either his teeth or claws ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... fall. Bubble-characters have burst, and high-sounding phrases have been exploded. Men whose education and antecedents should have made them brave and true, have shown themselves false and cowardly—impotent for good, and active only for evil. Unconsidered nobodies have meanwhile sprung forth from the mass of the people, and equally astonished themselves and others by the power, wisdom and courage they have displayed. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... both belligerents, should dream of entering the lists with either singly, was perhaps hopeless; but through the indifference of Congress the navy of a people, then second only to the English as maritime carriers, was left so utterly impotent that it counted for naught, even as an additional embarrassment to those with which the contending powers were already weighted. When, therefore, in retaliation for the seizures made under the French decree of January, 1798, Congress, ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... they lay in the suffocating ward. What was possible with wet sheets and small pieces of ice was done, but it was a wretched business, and those who were in Basra at that time and saw those spectacles will never forget them; nor will they forget the silent, impotent rage that filled the mind at the thought of the giant-bodied, small-headed Colossus of war which makes a useless sacrifice of men in ways such as these every day. But it had one useful effect, perhaps. A really Zoroastrian reverence for the sun came after seeing a case, ...
— In Mesopotamia • Martin Swayne
... field the arrows of the natives were quite impotent. A bullet could strike the heart at twice or three times the distance at which an arrow could be thrown. The Spaniards, hotly pursued, retreated from this broken ground several miles back into the open plain. Many were slain. Here the rout was arrested by the cavalry ...
— Ferdinand De Soto, The Discoverer of the Mississippi - American Pioneers and Patriots • John S. C. Abbott
... her was to employ a detective to track her down. He clenched his hands in impotent revolt. Not only had it been laid upon him to betray her confidence, but he must follow this up by dragging her from her hiding-place, and returning her to the bitter bondage from which he had once helped her ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... strike everybody as a strong argument in favour of the measure, and they know not by how many and by whom his example may be followed. The Orangemen are moving heaven and earth to create disturbances, and their impotent fury shows how low their cause is sunk. The Catholics, on the contrary, are temperate and calm, from confidence in their strength and the progressive advance of their course. But although I think the Catholics are now in a position ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... in a fit of impotent rage, made a dash to reach the fireplace, but his feet were hampered by the ulster, and he would have fallen heavily had not the doctor caught him in ...
— The Bag of Diamonds • George Manville Fenn
... mastered a noble spirit. All Malcolm could afterwards remember was that he came to himself dealing Liftore merciless blows, his foot on his back, and his weapon the earl's whip. His lordship, struggling to rise, turned up a face white with hate and impotent fury. ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... to flight, rarely waiting for the attack with swords: some of the wounded, in whose bodies the arrows from the cross-bows had penetrated to the very feather, drew them out with their hands, broke them with their teeth, and hurling them at the Spaniards with impotent fury, fell dead ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... was little more than a baby in the horse foreman's muscular grip. Tripped, with a heel behind his calf, he fell heavily, Lee upon him. Both arms were pinioned behind him, and Lee's neckerchief thrust into his mouth. He writhed in impotent rage. His outcries died in his throat, the loudest of them not reaching Marcia's ears above the creaking of her rocking-chair. Lee still held Hampton's tied hands gripped in his own. So the two men went out the back ...
— Judith of Blue Lake Ranch • Jackson Gregory
... vain to attempt in words a description of scenes of grandeur. Ink, at the best, is impotent in such matters; even paint fails to give an adequate idea. We can do no more than run over a list of names. From this commanding point of view Mont Blanc is visible in all his majesty—vast, boundless, solemn, incomprehensible—with ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... dark passage shun —, plain Communion sweet, quaff Companions, I have had Comparisons are odorous —are odious Compass, a narrow Compulsion, give you a reason on Concealment, like a worm in the bud Conceals, the maid who modestly Conceits, be not wise in your own Conclusion, most lame and impotent —, denoted a foregone Concord of sweet sounds Confirmations strong Conflict, dire was the noise of Conclusion, worse confounded Congregate, merchants most do Conjectures. I am weary of Conquer love, they, that run away Conquerors, a lean fellow beats all Conscience with ...
— Familiar Quotations • Various
... the sea, a stone sepulchre for the living dead, buried like a toad in a hole left by the running lava of life, guarded, watched, tortured in body and soul—a figure of tremendous tragedy, the hapless man once worshipped by the people spreading impotent hands to the outer world, until madness comes to his relief and suicide helps him to escape into eternity and leave only his wasted body ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... dispersed and we were absent—you could turn back to the Government of iniquity without reflecting that Divine Providence could permit, in the hour of great injustice, her emissary Don Emilio Aguinaldo to return resolved to chastise energetically the immoral and impotent Spanish Government. ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... body was water and then was flame; Till of a sudden, turning, he gripped an aito hard, A youth that stood with his omare,[8] one of the daily guard, And spat in his ear a command, and pointed and uttered a name, And hid in the shade of the house his impotent anger ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 14 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... contrary, all oppressors, all men thinking highly of the methods dictated by their nature, attribute the frustration of their desires to the want of sufficient rigor. Then they redouble the efforts of their impotent cruelty, which producing, as they must ever produce, new disappointments, they grow irritated against the objects of their rapacity; and then rage, fury, and malice, implacable because unprovoked, recruiting and reinforcing their avarice, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... went on, the tough and rough old sinner felt himself drawn to the son of his loins and sole continuator of his new family, with softnesses of sentiment that he could hardly credit and was wholly impotent to express. With a face, voice, and manner trained through forty years to terrify and repel, Rhadamanthus may be great, but he will scarce be engaging. It is a fact that he tried to propitiate Archie, but a fact that cannot be too lightly taken; the attempt was so ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... is not wholly irresponsive to the behests of the soul. While in the course of physical evolution many important functions have undergone remarkable changes, and organs, once active and useful, have become stunted, impotent, and in some cases extinct, yet on the other hand we see that seeds which have lain dormant in arid soil for hundreds of years can spring into leaf and flower under the influence of a ...
— Second Sight - A study of Natural and Induced Clairvoyance • Sepharial
... establishment of a 'good system of public education.'[383] He seems to have become more sentimental in later years. In the edition of 1843 he approves the Factory Acts, remarking that the last then passed 'may not, in some respects, have gone far enough.'[384] He approves a provision for the 'impotent poor,' on the principle of the Elizabethan act, though he disapproves the centralising tendency of the new poor-law. Though he is a good Malthusian,[385] and holds the instinct of population to be a 'constant quantity,'[386] he does not believe in the impossibility of improvement. ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... country dweller from the usual source of supplies. Before the days of the automobile, one could travel roads several feet deep in snow with horse and sleigh. An automobile has its limits and is more or less impotent in more than two feet of snow on a road unbroken by a powerful plow. So, if the oldest inhabitants can remember the winter of 18— "when we had snow to the top of the fence posts," it is a wise precaution to have an emergency supply of canned foods on hand. In February, 1934, we were snowbound ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... trouble—your feeling of horror at what you regard as sacrilege; for we Rebu hold the life of one animal no more sacred than the life of another, and have no more hesitation in shooting a cat than a deer. Surely your gods cannot be so powerful in Egypt and impotent elsewhere; and yet if they are as powerful, how is it that their vengeance has not fallen upon other peoples who slay without hesitation the ...
— The Cat of Bubastes - A Tale of Ancient Egypt • G. A. Henty
... Foch in the center an offensive so violent that the center would be pierced and the French armies cut in two. If this attack succeeded it would free at once the German right and separate into two impotent parts the entire French military force. During the 7th, 8th, and 9th of September the Imperial Prussian Guard directed to the compassing of that end all its energy and courage. All in vain. General Foch not only checked the German onslaught, but drove it back. ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... Ben, stamping his impotent fury, "'tis him—'tis him! The Judas Iscariot, and he's left us to die so that ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... half-way to the sloop. Sharkey dwelt long upon his aim before he fired. With the crack of the gun the swimmer reared himself up in the water, waved his hands in a gesture of warning, and roared out in a voice which rang over the bay. Then, as the sloop swung round her head-sails, and the pirate fired an impotent broadside, Stephen Craddock, smiling grimly in his death agony, sank slowly down to that golden couch which glimmered far ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... By that time a thousand shanty-boaters had heard about that girl's one shot of deadly accuracy. The woman folks on a thousand miles of reach and bend had had a bad example set before them. Doss himself felt an anger which was impotent against the woman who had shot Jest Prebold down. Probably other women would take to shooting, right off the bat, the same way. He despised ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
... furnace mouth drew near the monarch with his train— The baffled monarch, bowed and quelled, feeling how poor and vain Were all his boasted pomp and power, how impotent and Week The arm so void of strength that hour his ...
— Poems of the Heart and Home • Mrs. J.C. Yule (Pamela S. Vining)
... mentioned her brother. "Poor Ed," she said in a low voice. She went over to the man, leaning over him and smoothing back the hair from his forehead, Hollis looking glumly on, clenching his teeth in impotent sympathy. ...
— The Coming of the Law • Charles Alden Seltzer
... emphasized the possibility that democracy may govern badly and oppressively; Maine has warned us that the dominance of the commonalty may end in the triumph of the mediocre, and a more than Chinese stagnation; Carlyle has denounced democracy as powerful for destruction, but impotent for building up, as helpless in the face of great emergencies, as incapable of choosing good leaders; Lecky has demonstrated the danger of the corruption of the democracy by evil politicians; Belloc ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... scenes she had lately gone through, they were now so shattered that she was unable to rally. The doctor kept her in bed at first, recommended absolute quiet, and exhausted his formula with as beneficial a result as could be expected considering it attacked the secondary cause only, and was impotent to heal the suffering mind reacting upon the body. Bluebell continued in a torpid condition, scarcely giving any signs of life. One day, Mrs. Markham, who nursed her with unremitting zeal, quickened, perhaps, by the ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... bring good testimony of their good behaviour and soundness in religion, and such as had been servants to the king's Majesty, either decrepit or old; captains either at sea or land; soldiers maimed or impotent; decayed merchants; men fallen into decay through shipwreck, casualty of fire, or such evil accident; those that had been captives ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... breathing-places, at which the mind should be permitted to recover from its perturbation or astonishment: but, where it has been summoned upon a false alarm, and disturbed in the orderly course of its attention, by an impotent attempt at elevation, the consequences are still more disastrous. There is nothing so ridiculous (at least for a poet) as to fail in great attempts. If the reader foresaw the failure, he may receive some degree of mischievous ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... times, is this our coming in. More than one man has consumed his life in a flame of activity because he could not abide the coming in. 'The Lord shall keep ... thy coming in.' That means help for every lonely, impotent, inward ...
— The Threshold Grace • Percy C. Ainsworth
... flesh of the man he hated, tearing its way through the stiff collar, felt the demoniacal strength shooting down his arm, the fever at his finger tips. He saw the terrified face of his victim, a strong man but impotent in his grasp; heard the splash of the turgid waters; saw himself, his lust for vengeance unsatisfied, peering downwards through the dim and murky gloom. It was not only a physical nightmare which seized him. His brain, too, was his accuser. He saw with a hideous ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... northern France, are not matter of controversy; they have been proved by many extant military documents and by the testimony of many living witnesses. They were designed to reduce whole peoples to a state of impotent terror, beneath the level of humanity. The apology made for them, that by shortening resistance to the inevitable they were in effect merciful, is a blasphemous apology, which puts Germany in the place of the Almighty. The effect anticipated did not follow. The system of terrorism ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... Her eyes narrowed to slits and stabbed me with their spite. Her dark face grew turgid with impotent anger. As I stood there she was like to have killed me. Then like a flash her expression changed. With a dirty bejewelled hand she smoothed her tousled hair. Her coarse white teeth gleamed in a gold-capped smile. There was honey in ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... the Greek tragedies. Stephen von Hellmuth's work was one of those astounding Graeco-German plays in which Ibsen, Homer, and Oscar Wilde are compounded—and, of course, a few manuals of archeology. Agamemnon was neurasthenic and Achilles impotent: they lamented their condition at length, and naturally their outcries produced no change. The energy of the drama was concentrated in the role of Iphigenia—a nervous, hysterical, and pedantic Iphigenia, who lectured the hero, declaimed furiously, laid ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... handkerchiefs, relaxed their enmities in a common rush for the projecting ladder behind the dray and collided with Zussmann on the way. A one-legged, misery-eyed hunchback offered him penny diaries. He shook his head in impotent pity, and passed ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... GREATNESS: he had himself indeed modestly declined the public honour she intended him, and had taken a quantity of laudanum, in order to retire quietly off the stage; but we have already observed, in the course of our wonderful history, that to struggle against this lady's decrees is vain and impotent; and whether she hath determined you shall be hanged or be a prime minister, it is in either case lost labour to resist. Laudanum, therefore, being unable to stop the breath of our hero, which the fruit ...
— The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great • Henry Fielding
... position and renown which that measure brought you, I should have done you yeoman's service as your associate. However, that perpetual enemy of his own friends, who, in spite of having been honoured with the highest compliments on your part, has selected you of all people for the object of his impotent and enfeebled violence, has saved me the trouble by punishing himself. For he has made attempts, the disclosure of which has left him without a shred, not only of political position, but every of freedom of action. And though I should have preferred that ...
— Letters of Cicero • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... My arm is impotent; what worth to trim The bending sails! Look, I shall quaff a cup To Fate, while the wild ocean swallows up The shipwrecked youth, the man who lives ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... hideously as it struck at the antelope, and then strove to get free from the horns which the swart vitpense dragged out, and then stood up shivering by its assailant, which, far from thinking of attacking again, lay upon its side, biting the grass and tearing at the ground in its impotent fury. ...
— Off to the Wilds - Being the Adventures of Two Brothers • George Manville Fenn
... "is enthusiasm, but not enthusiasm in a straight line. We are impotent in directing it, like a boy with a toy engine. How carefully the child sets it off, how soon it goes off the rails! So youth is wrecked. The slightest obstacle sends it off at a tangent. The vital force expended in a wrong direction does evil instead of good. You know the story of Atalanta. ...
— Better Dead • J. M. Barrie
... here and there, possessed by impotent rage. The wheat was gone! That fact gave him a hollow, sickening pang. He met farmers he knew. They all threw up their hands at sight of him. Not one could find a voice. Finally he met Olsen. The little wheat farmer was white with passion. ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... Leghorne and Smirna, Madam, instead of France and Italy, where I had like to have had a Scimiter in my Guts, by an impotent old Turk, that spy'd me glancing at his Wife, when he had a hundred and fifty besides, and was past the use of one ...
— The Fine Lady's Airs (1709) • Thomas Baker
... glittering visions. What was he, after all? This future conqueror was a young officer on leave, obscure except in his immediate circle, with no inheritance, and very much in debt; awaited with anxiety by his affectionate parents, and a young lady whom he was about to marry for her fortune! Most impotent epilogue ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... thousand-handed goddess sits, serene and merciless, in the midst of her worshipers, like a Hindoo idol. Her skirts are wet with blood; her creation is based on destruction; her lives live only by murder. The cruel images of the pagan are truer delineations of Nature than the figures which typify the impotent charity of Christendom—an exotic in the midst ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... of the Hebrew boys, whom Satan would have killed; and that boy became the great leader and deliverer of Israel. All the persecutions of the people Israel in Egypt were Satan's work. When at last they had left the house of bondage, Satan in impotent rage stirred up Pharaoh to attempt their destruction; but Pharaoh and his army found their graves in the ...
— Studies in Prophecy • Arno C. Gaebelein
... a strong one, but Torbert ought to have made a fight. Had he been defeated in this, his withdrawal then to await the result at Fisher's Hill would have been justified, but it does not appear that he made any serious effort of all to dislodge the Confederate cavalry: his impotent attempt not only chagrined me very much, but occasioned much unfavorable ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. II., Part 4 • P. H. Sheridan
... than "god" or "spirit" may express that with which the partaker in the communal feast originally sought contact. "When you sacrifice," to quote some words of Miss Jane Harrison, "you build as it were a bridge between your mana, your will, your desire, which is weak and impotent, and |177| that unseen outside mana which you believe to be strong and efficacious. In the fruits of the earth which grow by some unseen power there is much mana; you want that mana. In the loud-roaring bull and the thunder is ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... the fight-wonted Harald rode the sea-steed from the south In the shape of Faxe, The slayer of Vandals as wax became altogether as impotent. Birger by guardian sprites outcast in mare's shape met him As all men ...
— The Sagas of Olaf Tryggvason and of Harald The Tyrant (Harald Haardraade) • Snorri Sturluson
... the noose, and was wriggling out of it. He had freed one foot before the Indian had recovered himself. Then with a terrific yank the horseman snapped in the slack, the cowman's feet flew from under him, and with one foot taut in the air, caught at the ankle, he lay cursing and shaking an impotent fist. ...
— The Young Railroaders - Tales of Adventure and Ingenuity • Francis Lovell Coombs
... useful and fleckless. Hedda Gabler is painted as Mr. Sargent might paint a lady of the London fashionable world; his brush would divine and emphasize, as Ibsen's pen does, the disorder of her nerves, and the ravaging concentration of her will in a sort of barren and impotent egotism, while doing justice to the superficial attractiveness of her cultivated physical beauty. He would show, as Ibsen shows, and with an equal lack of malice prepense, various detestable features which the mask of good ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... in that power which, as I pointed out, has sometimes been so potent and sometimes so impotent, but which, if it is allowed its proper scope, can never fail. I ...
— The War and Unity - Being Lectures Delivered At The Local Lectures Summer - Meeting Of The University Of Cambridge, 1918 • Various
... off from her penetrating bows like a spent wave. But baffled though she was for the moment, Georgie had been aware that Mrs Quantock seethed with revolutionary ideas: she deeply resented this confiscation of what was certainly her property, though she was impotent to stop it, and Georgie knew just what she felt. It was all very well to say that Lucia's schemes were entirely in accord with the purposes of the Guides. That might be so, but Mrs Quantock would not cease to think that ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... great effort of will, she controlled herself, but the impulse yet remained—a striving, clamouring force, impotent but insistent. ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... lame and impotent conclusion, and did not commend the support or even the respect of the Senate. Mr. Thurman, a member of the committee that reported it, made haste to announce that he had not approved it. He treated the ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... considerable army as general of the Church, and was now acting for Venice. Why he effected no diversion while the Imperial troops were marching upon Rome, and why he delayed to relieve the city, was never properly explained. Folk attributed his impotent conduct partly to a natural sluggishness in warfare, and partly to his hatred for the house of Medici. Leo X had deprived him of his dukedom, and given it to a Medicean prince. It is to this ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... broken down. A woman had found her way in between the joints of an armour which he had grown to believe impenetrable, and henceforth life was a wreck. The old, quiet stoicism, which had been the inner stimulus of his career, was a thing altogether overthrown and impotent. He was too old to reconstruct life anew; the fragments were too many, and the wreck too complete. Only his philosophy showed him very plainly what the end must be. Across the sky of his vision it seemed to be written in ...
— Berenice • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... heavens! Is that Mrs. Roberts's idea of preparing my son? And his poor young wife!' He addresses his demand to Mrs. Crashaw, who lifts the hands of impotent despair. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... your luck to be left in the ruck, and of fame you're an impotent seeker, If you fruitlessly aim at a Senate's acclaim when you can't catch the eye of the Speaker, If whenever you rise you observe with surprise that the House is perceptibly thinner, And your eloquent pleas are a ...
— Lyra Frivola • A. D. Godley
... with something that had not been there before, his impotent love. Hilda knelt down beside the bed and pressed her forehead against the hand upon the covering, the hand that had so little more to do. ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... similar but milder strain, in Faneuil Hall. Mr. Webster's attitude was not unlike that of Hamilton when he published his celebrated attack on Adams, which ended by advising all men to vote for that objectionable man. The conclusion was a little impotent in both instances, but in Mr. Webster's case the results were better. The politicians and lovers of availability had judged wisely, and Taylor was ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... Protestantism has never been stained by such a crime. I mention it to invoke gratitude that such a misguided zeal has passed away and is never likely to return. Catholic historians do not pretend to deny the horrid facts, but ascribe the massacre to political animosities rather than religious,—a lame and impotent defence of their persecuting Church in the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... even walk. She looked at them for a moment, as she passed, with a sort of well-bred surprise in her air, as though she marvelled to see them there; her black dress touched Laddie, and he caught at it with an impotent bark. ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... struck with horror at the description I had given him of those terrible engines, and the proposal I had made. He was amazed, how so impotent and grovelling an insect as I (these were his expressions), could entertain such inhuman ideas, and in so familiar a manner, as to appear wholly unmoved at all the scenes of blood and desolation, which I had painted, as the common effects ...
— Gulliver's Travels - Into Several Remote Regions of the World • Jonathan Swift
... heaped up the earth over him by gramarye to the end that the unfortunate might perish, reflecting that "The live man hath no murtherer."[FN99] Secondly, he did so with the design that, as Alaeddin could not come forth from underground, he would also be impotent to bring out the Lamp from the souterrain. So presently he wended his ways and retired to his own land, Africa, a sadder man and disappointed of all his expectations. Such was the case with the Wizard; but as regards Alaeddin when the earth ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... were to be classed under four heads, namely: (1) Those who were destitute, helpless or impotent; (2) Destitute able-bodied persons not holding land; (3) Destitute able-bodied persons who were holders of small portions of land; (4) The able-bodied employed at wages insufficient for their support, when the price of ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... to do with my present point. What I am saying is that, unless you erect that structure of a faith which is an act of your will and of your whole nature, and not the mere assent of your understanding, upon your belief, your belief is impotent, and is of no use at all, and you might as well not ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... need he—together with this sting of passion—have felt also this impotent and angry despair? Before his eyes had seen that figure lying on the straw of Mrs. Ginnell's outhouse, could he ever have dreamed it possible that ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... shows at this point a great inferiority to natural reproduction, since its product is dead. Fine art shapes inert matter and peoples the mind with impotent ghosts. What influence it has—for every event has consequences—is not pertinent to its inspiration. The art of the past is powerless even to create similar art in the present, unless similar conditions recur independently. The moments snatched for art ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... made up of so many parts, each of which separately might have been powerful and highly considered, was impotent to a degree which moved at once pity and laughter. Already one most remarkable experiment had been tried on this strange empire. A small fragment, hardly a three hundredth part of the whole in extent, hardly a thirtieth part of the whole in population, had been detached from the rest, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... them. They will see that if there is anything at the back of this vast process, with a consciousness and a purpose in any way resembling our own—a being who knows what he wants and is doing his best to get it—he is instead of a holy and all-wise God, a scatter-brained, semi-powerful, semi-impotent monster. They will recognise as clearly as they ever did the old familiar facts which seemed to them evidences of God's wisdom, love, and goodness; but they will find that these facts, when taken in connection with the others, only supply us with a standard ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... religion are scattered to the winds. The liberalism for the sake of which they were willing to eviscerate their Christianity has already lost its vitality; it survives as a pale parliamentary tradition, impotent before the tide of socialism rising behind its back. The Catholicism which they wished to see gently lingering is being driven out of national life by official spoliations and popular mockeries. It is fast becoming what it was in the beginning, a sect with more or ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... in overcoming the enemies Of his system, can hardly doubt his courage. Calumny or error has thrown an unmerited disgrace over his last wretched days. He has been supposed to have wounded himself in an impotent attempt to put an end to his life. It has been ascertained that such was not the fact, the pistol by which he was wounded having been fired by one of the soldiers by whom he was arrested. He is stated also to have wanted that firmness in death which so many of his ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... a remarkably accurate kick under the official coat-tails, picked the deputy up bodily and hurled him in a heap in the same corner where T. Morgan Carey sprawled, blinking (for his glasses had been shaken off in the melee) and weeping with fear and impotent rage. ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... Or is it not much rather automatic inward machinery that executes the marvellous work, while the mind catches here and there some glimpse of the operation, now with delight and adhesion, now with impotent rebellion? When impulses work themselves out unimpeded we say we act; when they are thwarted we say we are acted upon; but in neither case do we in the least understand the natural history of what is occurring. The mind at best vaguely ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... just in describing such natural phenomena, and in blending them with the turmoil of battle, that Quintus is in his element; yet for such a scene he substitutes what is, by comparison, a lame and impotent conclusion. Of that awful cry that rang over the sea heralding the coming of Thetis and the Nymphs to the death-rites of her son, and the panic with which it filled the host, Quintus is silent. Again, Homer ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... the horrid yell of malignancy which arose, and echoed through the black chamber of that region of wickedness and misery, it would have made you shrink into nothingness with terror. They fairly gnashed on me with their teeth in impotent rage. At length old Adams got upon a whiskey-still—they have such things in hell—the pattern was got from there when introduced here, and made a speech to his associates. From what he said, I found that ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... that great light there are the two lines; the one purest white of righteousness, and the other tinged with a ruddier glow, the line of love. The one adorns and sets off the other. Love without righteousness is flaccid, a mere gush of good-natured sentiment, impotent to confer blessing, powerless to evoke reverence. Righteousness without love is as white as snow, and as cold as ice; repellent, howsoever it may excite the sentiment of awe-struck distance. But we need that the righteousness shall be loving, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the way all sensible men look at it. She is not the Sphinx; she is an angel, and I call her my Lady Caprice. Hate her for being Caprice! You incorrigible muddle-head. Why, I love Caprice for being her shadow. Poor, impotent love that can't solve a problem. The only one she ever set me. I've gone about it like a fool. What is the use putting up little bits of telegraphs on the island? I'll make a kite a hundred feet high, get five miles of rope ready against the next hurricane; and then I'll rub it with phosphorus ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... she darted away in the direction of the hall as fast as her feet could carry her over the level greensward; rage seeming literally to lend her wings, so rapidly did her fiery passions spur her on the road to impotent revenge. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... sayd Prouince is called Menatonon, a man impotent in his lims, but otherwise for a Sauage, a very graue and wise man, and of a very singular good discourse in matters concerning the state, not onely of his owne Countrey, and the disposition of his owne men, but also of his neighbours round about him as well ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of - the English Nation. Vol. XIII. America. Part II. • Richard Hakluyt
... himself. To force an entrance into the banquet-hall of a great and powerful noble surrounded by the rank of Naples, and to arraign him for what to his boon companions would appear but an act of gallantry, was an exploit that could not fail to be at once ludicrous and impotent. He mused a moment; and remembering that Zicci was among the guests, determined to apply himself to the Corsican. He therefore, slipping a few crowns into the porter's hand, said that he was commissioned to seek the Signor Zicci upon an errand of life and death, and easily ...
— Zicci, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... a convent?" asked the Baroness. "But in such cases religion is impotent to subdue nature, and the most piously trained girls lose their head!—Get up, pray, monsieur; do you not understand that everything is final between us? that I look upon you with horror? that you have crushed ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... no lasting peace until the most terrible war machine the world has ever known shall have been destroyed, reduced to an impotent state of non-existence. Ideals will not destroy this machine, but practical means and getting down to the facts of the case will do so. Pasteur did not overcome hydrophobia by writing treatises and dissertations. ...
— Fighting France • Stephane Lauzanne
... voluntary power of man over his animal frame comes next under Mr Godwin's consideration, and he concludes by saying, that the voluntary power of some men, in this respect, is found to extend to various articles in which other men are impotent. But this is reasoning against an almost universal rule from a few exceptions; and these exceptions seem to be rather tricks, than powers that may be exerted to any good purpose. I have never heard ...
— An Essay on the Principle of Population • Thomas Malthus
... Nobody, as yet, admitted it, but the first blow had been dealt, and an evolution was beginning, which became more perceptible at each succeeding Salon. And what a stroke it would be if, amidst the unconscious copies of impotent essayists, amidst the timid artful attempts of tricksters, a master were suddenly to reveal himself, giving body to the new formula by dint of audacity and power, without compromise, showing it such as it should be, substantial, entire, ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... supreme and omnipotent, materia [25] medica, hygiene, and animal magnetism are impotent; and their only supposed efficacy is in apparently delud- ing reason, denying revelation, and dethroning Deity. The tendency of mental healing is to uplift mankind; but this method perverted, is "Satan let loose." Hence the [30] deep ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... do not think it necessary further to prosecute this vindication of his memory, we yet think it our duty, when writing a memoir of him, thus briefly to set aside the groundless accusation, whether it be adduced by prelatic or Erastian writers,—his baffled antagonists when living, his impotent ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... written nothing but the 'Ernest Maltravers' books, you would think perhaps more highly of him. Do you not think it possible now? It is his most impotent struggling into poetry, which sets about proving a negative of genius on him—that, which the Athenaeum praises as 'respectable attainment in various walks of literature'—! like the Athenaeum, isn't it? and worthy praise, to be administered by professed judges of art? What is to be expected ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... memories. The three people at the little table made a group from which, while he ate, he could not withdraw his eyes. The suffering passivity of the woman, the sly, sinister humor in Tom Mowbray's heavy, grey face, the livid and impotent hate that frothed in the crippled man, and his strange jerky gestures, the atmosphere of nightmare cruelty and suffering that enveloped them like a miasma these bit themselves into his imagination and left it sore. He saw and tasted nothing of what he ate and ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... laws of supply and demand which, just because it had wished them out of existence, it had grown accustomed to believe could be ignored, oscillating, according to age, temperament or experience, between resignation and impotent fury, between old-fashioned trade-unionism and the latest fashion in extremism: France, emerging nerve-racked from a fifty years' obsession and a five years' nightmare, half-dead with sorrow and suspense, yet ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... pleasing features about her. I admired her confidence in spite of her disadvantages. She must have credited me with a diabolic appetite, but these women often contrive to extract charms out of their depravity which their delicacy would be impotent to furnish. She begged me to sup with her, and as she persisted I was obliged to refuse her in a way I should not have allowed myself to use with any other woman. She then begged me to take four tickets for the play the next day, which was to be for her benefit. I saw it was only a matter ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... complications of agony they endure and how very dark their odd convulsive species of existence is made, only that one man may buy forgetfulness by the glass. If I let my imagination loose, I can hear the immense army of the young crying to the dumb and impotent sky, and they all cry for bread. Mercy! how the little children suffer! And I have seen them by the hundred—by the thousand—and only helped from caprice; I could do no other. The iron winter is nearing us, and soon the dull agony of cold will swoop down and bear the gnawing hunger ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... works, so that the product, as a whole, is visible to the mental eye, as a new creation or construction, he has an immense advantage over all critics of his performance. Refined reasonings are impotent to overthrow it; epigrams glance off from it, as rifle-bullets rebound when aimed at a granite wall; and it stands erect long after the reasonings and the epigrams are forgotten. Even when its symmetry is destroyed by a long and destructive siege, a pile of stones still remains, as at Fort Sumter, ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... out and out challenge to him to strike her. When it came to the point he could not do it, of course. He turned away, wild with impotent rage. Must she always get the best of him? If there had only been a man of her people there that he could take it out on! He broke into passionate denunciations of her. It was a weird enough scene, there on the ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner
... them, and the great heaps of maize which they are forced to bring for their food. I can tell you the tears such a sight brings to one's eyes are hot and bitter. These are no sentimental grievances; hunger, and pain, and labour without hope and without reward, and the constant bitterness of impotent resentment. To you all this must sound remote and almost fabulous. But try to imagine Farmer Smith's team driven off by the police and himself beaten till he delivered his hay, his oats and his farm-servant for the use ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... Azrael. And the struggles of the passionate wife were, to my astonishment, even more energetic than my own. There had been much in her stern nature to impress me with the belief that, to her, death would have come without its terrors;—but not so. Words are impotent to convey any just idea of the fierceness of resistance with which she wrestled with the Shadow. I groaned in anguish at the pitiable spectacle. I would have soothed—I would have reasoned; but, in the intensity of her wild desire for life,—for life—but for life—solace and ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... Behind his voiceless misery was immeasurable hatred of those who had struck him this blow; at moments a revengeful fury all but maddened him. He held his mother's band; if he could but feel one pressure of the slight fingers before they were impotent for ever! And this much was granted him. Shortly before midday the open eyes trembled to consciousness, the lips moved in endeavour to speak. To Hubert it seemed that his intense gaze had worked a miracle, effecting that which his will demanded. She ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... did not suggest that the prediction of the seven godmothers was false. But, being helpless, he did not allow it to disturb him. His temperament was such that he did not worry about evils which he was impotent to remedy. In any case, so far as could be judged, the occurrence foretold was not imminent. Monsieur de La Rochecoupee viewed events as a statesman, and statesmen never look beyond the present moment. I am speaking of the shrewdest and most far-sighted. After all, supposing one day the ...
— The Story Of The Duchess Of Cicogne And Of Monsieur De Boulingrin - 1920 • Anatole France
... and is not! If Death be stronger than Life, so that he stops life, how then was Life able so to flout him, that he, the thing that was not, arose from the antenatal sepulchre on which Death sat throned in impotent negation of entity, unable to preclude existence, and yet able to annihilate it? Life alone is: nothingness is not; Death cannot destroy; he is not the antagonist, not the opposite of life." Some such argument Richard, I say, saw vaguely ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... him appear more ridiculous. The longer he thought the more sure he was that the girls were beginning to guess his position, and that his only course was a polite indifference to both. But this policy promised to lead through a thorny path, and to what? In impotent rage at himself he ground his teeth during the pauses between the stanzas that he was compelled to sing. Such was the discord in his heart that he felt like uttering notes ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... when the Burmese found themselves impotent to turn us out of Rangoon, the court of Ava would be glad to negotiate—had not, until the autumn was drawing to a close, thought of making any preparations to supply the army with water carriage. They now, ...
— On the Irrawaddy - A Story of the First Burmese War • G. A. Henty
... her for a minute or two, then, with a smothered oath upon his lips, he turned slowly to the door and opened it. Before leaving the room, however, he said, in a voice half-stifled by impotent passion— ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... Sir Philip de Comines, seneschal to King Louis, afterward told me that His Majesty, in writing this letter to the Duke of Burgundy, actually took counsel and devoted much time and thought to the choice of a baneful or impotent saint to recommend to his "noble brother of Burgundy." Disaster to Louis had once followed supplication to Saint Hubert, and the king hoped that the worthy saint might prove equally unpropitious for Charles. Yolanda's wonderful "t" was certainly ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major
... God rest his soul, one wonders whether he has yet learned that Columbus discovered America. He had not yet heard of it when he finished his book, though Columbus had returned to Spain three months before. O most lame and impotent conclusion! But the fifteenth century, though it had an infinite childlike curiosity, had no nose for news. Nuremberg nodded peacefully on while a new world loomed up beyond the seas, and studied Michael Wolgemut's picture of Noah ...
— Printing and the Renaissance - A paper read before the Fortnightly Club of Rochester, New York • John Rothwell Slater
... progress of this astonishing revolution with impotent surprise. Stefano Colonna, who was absent on the eventful day, expressed his scorn of the mob and their leader. But a popular attack on his palace convinced him of his error and forced him to fly from the city. Within fifteen days the triumph of Rienzi seemed to be complete, when ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... to the horse-paddock, I was overtaken and passed by Arthur H——, one of the two brothers reported to be starting the sawmill; and I afterward remembered that, though we saluted each other, and exchanged impotent criticisms on the weather, I had by this time obtained such ascendency over the meddlesome and querulous part of my nature that I had never once thought of asking him if ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... thee [thy course] for each and every day. Thine enemy the Serpent hath been given over to the fire, the serpent-fiend Sebau hath fallen down headlong; his arms have been bound in chains, and thou hast hacked off his legs; and the sons of impotent revolt shall nevermore rise up against thee. The Temple of the Aged One [Footnote: i.e., R[a] of Heliopolis.] (i.e., R[a]) keepeth festival, and the voice of those who rejoice is in the mighty dwelling. The gods exult when they ...
— Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life • E. A. Wallis Budge
... of our close and crowded houses into the night and morning, and we see what majestic beauties daily wrap us in their bosom. How willingly we would escape the barriers which render them comparatively impotent, escape the sophistication and second thought, and suffer nature to intrance us. The tempered light of the woods is like a perpetual morning, and is stimulating and heroic. The anciently reported spells of these places creep ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... grace that it did bring, And the light that o'er it flowed, With the pureness that it showed, And the pureness that it meant? Could he skill to make it seen As he saw? For this, I ween, He were likewise impotent. ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... powerless to fight, was filling her life. It was absurd, impossible, not to be thought of, and yet all the time his insistence delighted her. He had so much the air of one who has always his own way. She felt her powers of resistance becoming almost impotent, and she watched their dissipation with secret joy. How was it possible to resist a lover so confident, so authoritative, especially when her whole heart was filled with a passionate longing to throw everything else to the winds and to place her hands in his. Perhaps ...
— The Governors • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... he burst out. "What a poor, impotent wretch He's made me—a thing to bruise its useless hands beating the door that will never open! It maddens me—especially when all the world's happy, like to-day—all happy but me. And you so loyal and true! What ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... secretary-birds with pens stuck clerk-like behind their ears (as useless an emblem of sinecure office as gold keys, silver, and coronation armour)—in spite of whole flights of geese, capable enough of saving capitols, but impotent to wield one of their own all-conquering quills—in spite, also, (keen-eyed categorists, be to my faults in ratiocination a little blind, for very cheerfulness,) in spite, I say, of copying presses, manifold inditers, and automaton artists, MAN IS A ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... more intimate. She felt that even after two years of marriage she did not know her husband any better than when she first met him. There seemed to be between them an indefinable yet very real barrier which, for some unknown reason, she was impotent to tear down. Sometimes, too, she resented him making so little of her. Instead of taking her into his confidence in his business matters, he treated her as a child, whose opinion on serious things ...
— Bought and Paid For - From the Play of George Broadhurst • Arthur Hornblow
... to wake in the morning as if life had no joy to give; and he knew, too, what it was to lay his sins at a Saviour's feet, and to take the light yoke upon him. How anxious was he to lead his fellow-sinner there! Though his simple efforts seemed impotent at the time, years after, when his school-fellow had grown a steady and useful Christian, he dated his first serious impressions to this time of disgrace; and the remembrance of Louis' sweet ...
— Louis' School Days - A Story for Boys • E. J. May
... If I were only a clever book character I'd execute some dramatic coup and confound my enemies—book people always do. But my mind is a blank, my ingenuity is at a complete standstill. I feel perfectly foolish and impotent. To save me, I can't understand how that gold got where it was, for the cashier's cage is made of wire and the door has a spring-lock. I heard it snap back of me when I followed the Count outside. I had an insane idea that his nose would stretch if I pulled it and I believe ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... decision of the Court, declines to ask the lawyers for farther help.[29] There is an end of that job and its fee. Nevertheless, his 'blatant brother' shall soon see if law is as inadequate, and advocacy as impotent, as he fancies. Providence is this time in their favour. Pompilia was consigned to the 'Convertite' (converted ones). She was therefore a sinner. Guido has been judged guilty: but there was no word as to the innocence of his wife. The sisterhood ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... who all along had been back in one corner of the church, came forward; and Allan and his maid kneeled before him, while the old knight, held an unwilling witness, gnashed his teeth in impotent rage; and the friar began ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... for death; and at midnight, while her lover was wandering, mad with the horror of impotent fear, around the white walls of the convent, Sister Maddelena, for love of Michele, gave up her life. How, was never known. That she was indeed dead was only a suspicion, for when Biscari finally compelled the civil authorities to enter the convent, ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... stands blotted against the curtain of the door. MALISE enters. For a moment he does not see her standing there against the curtain that is much the same colour as her dress. His face is that of a man in the grip of a rage that he feels to be impotent. Then, seeing her, he pulls himself together, walks to his armchair, and sits down there in ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... hard to describe her impotent wrath, her sense of outrage and irreparable loss, as one by one these changes effaced some souvenir of her early life. The past was once dead already; they were killing it a second time. Her feelings at length became so ...
— Miss Ludington's Sister • Edward Bellamy
... sudden inquiry concerning my loose change, and I was furnished with a memorandum-book in which to write down my daily disbursements. Frequent visits to the opera (oh, the torture of those evenings!) had been an invariable rule with the Mountchessingtons; and, at the risk of rendering impotent the tympanum of both ears, I was compelled to continue that respectable custom. Persons occupying our position should be careful with whom they associated; and the character of my companions underwent a severe investigation. She even ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... to them is a step-mother, who gives all to some of her children, and deprives the others of every thing: they punish it for its partiality, and clearly shew that the motives borrowed from a life hereafter are impotent against the fury of those passions to which a corrupt administration has given birth; that the terror of the punishments in this world are too feeble against necessity; against criminal habits; against dangerous organization uncorrected ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... in impotent rage, moved swiftly out of the bedchamber, closing the door behind him; and straightway the King heard a talk, to this effect, proceeding from ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... armour, is in fearful combat with the seven-headed dragon, which is endeavouring to devour the child. Although struck by lightning, the dragon is striving to twist his tail round the legs of the angel, and seizes the cloak of the Virgin with one of his hands. Other infernal monsters are writhing with impotent rage, and falling with ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... anarch, is passing. It is safer to be a soldier than a working-man. The chance for life is greater in an active campaign than in a factory or a coal-mine. In the matter of killing, war is growing impotent, and this in face of the fact that the machinery of war was never so expensive in the past nor so dreadful. War-equipment to- day, in time of peace, is more expensive than of old in time of war. A standing army costs more to maintain than it used ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London
... something taps upon the window pane. Faster, faster, like metallic clicks of a speeding-up machine, the sleet rattles for a little while, and lo! where are the leaves, the flowers, of yesterday! Thus did the Colonel age at this quick approach of blighting cold which the optimism of his nature was impotent to withstand. Yet he was still unwilling to give up the fight. Jeb was afraid, not a coward! There lay a vast difference between these, and he ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... are already in possession of all the data. We can wait; but meanwhile we need not pretend that because we do not understand them, therefore life and will can accomplish nothing; we need not imagine that "life"—with its higher developments and still latent powers—is an impotent nonentity. The philosophic attitude, surely, is to observe and recognise its effects, both what it can and what it cannot achieve, and to realise that our present knowledge of it is extremely partial ...
— Life and Matter - A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's 'Riddle of the Universe' • Oliver Lodge
... human sacrifice; while many millions in lands devastated are homeless, starving, or ruined in body or soul—these are part of the offering, forced upon humanity by a godless materialism, while a divided Christian Church stands by impotent. ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy
... went out, but her biting kiss had not hurt me. My heart was full of hope and joy. This girl's impotent jealousy had convinced me of the reality of my happiness. I was beloved, and I loved again; and could the venomous tongue of a jealous woman incense me against an angel like Flamma? True love is like pure gold, and the acid of calumny does not destroy it, but gives new proof of its ...
— Dr. Dumany's Wife • Mr Jkai
... also bitterly deplore, inwardly, that Beethoven allowed himself to be seduced into using the big drum and triangle in the Finale of the Ninth Symphony. Of Berlioz, Wagner, and my humble self, it is no wonder that "like draws to like," and, as we are treated as impotent canaille amongst musicians, it is quite natural that we should be on good terms with the canaille among the instruments. Certainly here, as in all else, it is the right thing to seize upon and hold fast [the] mass of harmony. In face of the most wise ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... piano and the carriages and the high silk hat from Piccadilly. Her husband had had the luxuries of wealth, and here he was living like a Spartan on his hill— and alone; though he had a wife whom men had beseiged both before and after marriage. A feeling of impotent indignation suddenly took possession of her. Here he was with two women, unattached,—one interesting and good and agreeable and good-looking, and the other almost a beauty,—who were part of the whole rustic scheme in which he lived. They made him comfortable, they did the hundred ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... in a nightmare. He saw the shapeless terror that was moving toward him, but he was impotent to stay or to escape it. He had done all that he could. There was nothing left ...
— The Lost Word - A Christmas Legend of Long Ago • Henry Van Dyke
... things were good; mature only in her love. And to be struck down like that, while your God looked down from Heaven and would not take her part." All at once he seemed to lose control of himself. One of those furies of impotent grief and wrath that assailed him from time to time, blind, insensate, incoherent, suddenly took possession of him. A torrent of words issued from his lips, and he flung out an arm, the fist clenched, in a fierce, quick gesture, partly ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... Indian in the boy's savage soul asserted itself, and he fought like a little demon. Pitying the child in its impotent rage, the man gave him ...
— The Last Spike - And Other Railroad Stories • Cy Warman
... ourselves altogether insufficient for these things, we are weak and impotent; and our Saviour hath told us, "Without me ye can do nothing:" We are justified freely by God's grace, through the redemption that is in Jesus Christ; not justified by our own works. How great a contradiction ...
— A Sermon Preached at the Quaker's Meeting House, in Gracechurch-Street, London, Eighth Month 12th, 1694. • William Penn
... to other lodgings at the beginning of each quarter of the year, so traversing till doomsday, being impotent of staying in one place, and finding some ease by so purning [journeying] and changing habitations. Their chameleon-like bodies swim in the air near the earth with bag and baggage; and at such revolution of time, seers, ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous
... going of Henrietta, a flight before the dawn. Saw, through a thick scent-drenched atmosphere, between the expiring lamp-light and broadening day, a deserted child beating its little hands, in the extremity of its impotent anguish, upon the pillows of a disordered unmade bed. Saw a man, too, worn and travel-stained from long riding throughout the night, lost to all decent dignities of self-control, savage with the ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... those precipitous rocks. Corp was shouting, gesticulating, impotent. "How can you ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... gathering strength to break out in indignant protest; and finally, roar out in rebellious anger, giving Robert the idea of an imprisoned monster of gigantic strength which had been harnessed whilst it slept, but had wakened at last to find itself impotent against its ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... Impotent their seething! The overwhelming Crooper pursued his conquering way. He leaned more and more toward the magnetic girl, his growing tenderness having that effect upon him, and his head inclining so far that his bedewed brow ...
— Seventeen - A Tale Of Youth And Summer Time And The Baxter Family Especially William • Booth Tarkington
... yelled one of them to the other in an access of impotent fury. "A dandy old mess you've made of this job, Mister bloomin' Peter Burton, haven't you? and dragged me into it along with yer! I wish I'd never had nothin' at all to do with the cussed business, now, I do; I knowed it was boun' to go a mucker, from ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... Could have passed in kingly mood, Would he ever have endued Canvas with the peerless thing, In the grace that it did bring, And the light that o'er it flowed, With the pureness that it showed, And the pureness that it meant? Could he skill to make it seen As he saw? For this, I ween, He were likewise impotent. ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... blows; but he fought in vain. His cousin's superior strength mastered him from the beginning; he felt like an infant in Richard's powerful grasp. Not until the storm of furious imprecations in which the lad at first vented his impotent rage had died away into stifled moans and sobs of pain, did Richard's vengeance come to an end. He flung the boy from him, broke the whip between his strong hands, and hurled the fragments far into the water, then walked away to the house, leaving Hugo to sob his heart out, like a passionate child, ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... be the result of this war on the field of battle, to France indeed it can bring only one end. For her there is no future save that of a military empire. Her life blood is dried up. This war will sweep away all power of recuperation. She will remain impotent to increase her race, sterile of new forces for good, her young men's blood gone to win the barren fields of Alsace. Her one purpose in the new Europe will be to hold a sword, not her own, over the struggling form of a resurgent Germany in the interests of another people. Let Germany ...
— The Crime Against Europe - A Possible Outcome of the War of 1914 • Roger Casement
... ravings, even in the mouth of some impotent beldame, were enough to excite a shudder, but in that dreary epoch, these curses from the lips of clergymen were deemed sufficient to draw down celestial lightning upon the head, not of the blasphemer, but of his victim. Men, who trembled neither ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... out challenge to him to strike her. When it came to the point he could not do it, of course. He turned away, wild with impotent rage. Must she always get the best of him? If there had only been a man of her people there that he could take it out on! He broke into passionate denunciations of her. It was a weird enough scene, there on the shore in the ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner
... pain, then they would moan a little, as if gathering strength to break out in indignant protest; and finally, roar out in rebellious anger, giving Robert the idea of an imprisoned monster of gigantic strength which had been harnessed whilst it slept, but had wakened at last to find itself impotent against ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... has been the principle of that great instinct of futurity which has animated all reformers, persistent believers in the Apocalypse, from Joachim of Flora down to the Protestant sectary of our days. This impotent effort to establish a perfect society has been the source of the extraordinary tension which has always made the true Christian an athlete struggling against the existing order of things. The idea ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... of the many savage tribes who, as we shall show, possess, but neglect, an Eternal Creator. He would do what, in the secular sphere, was done by the Mikado of Japan. The Mikado was a political Dendid or Ndengei—an awful, withdrawn, impotent potentate. Power was wielded by the Tycoon. A Mikado of genius asserted himself; hence arose modern Japan. In the same way, a religious reformer like Khuen Ahten in Egypt would preach down minor gods, ghosts and sacred beasts, and proclaim the primal Maker, Ndengei, Dendid, Mtanga. ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... dog scarcely six inches high, and but twice as long, would spring from the ground as if a pound of dynamite had exploded beneath him, and would make a desperate effort to throw himself into the wagon. Another, howling in impotent anger, would jump full at a horse's throat, would roll beneath the feet of the team, but in some miraculous fashion would escape unhurt, and would scramble upon a bank to try again. It was a real relief when the discouraged pack fell away. Had I ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... age of twelve must forever continue to do so. They may not learn a trade or be bound as apprentices. Servants and laborers may not carry arms nor play at foot-ball or tennis; they are encouraged, however, to have bows and arrows and use the same on Sundays and holidays. Impotent beggars are to be supported by the ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... yet, and smiting his broad chest, and gnashing his teeth in impotent malignity, suddenly a quick step became audible at a distance. The sound fell on his ear sharpened by the stimulus of fiery passions and of conscious fear, long ere it could have been perceived by ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... glance at Dale, but he had forgotten her existence and was poring over the battles of Pompey. Such indifference did not hurt her now:—it was the emptiness of that door! Still staring, silently beating her hands together in impotent rage, her face burning with mortification, two big tears rolled down her cheeks and fell upon the rug. Mac whined. He did ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... Is that Mrs. Roberts's idea of preparing my son? And his poor young wife!' He addresses his demand to Mrs. Crashaw, who lifts the hands of impotent despair. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... I'd rather far be blind To my own faults, though patent to mankind, Nay, live in the belief that foul is fair, Than see and grin in impotent despair. There was an Argive nobleman, 'tis said, Who all day long had acting in his head: Great characters on shadowy boards appeared, While he looked on and listened, clapped and cheered: In all things else he fairly filled his post, Friendly as neighbour, ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... into masses; and poverty, also in accumulation enough, lies impassably separated from it; opposed, uncommunicating, like forces in positive and negative poles. The gods of this lower world sit aloft on glittering thrones, less happy than Epicurus's gods, but as indolent, as impotent; while the boundless living chaos of ignorance and hunger welters, terrific in its dark fury, under their feet. How much among us might be likened to a whited sepulcher: outwardly all pomp and strength, but inwardly full of horror and despair and dead men's ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... George!"* Withdrawing the blade, he wiped it daintily on his cambric handkerchief. There was no blood. Mr. Oover, with unpunctured shirt-front, was repeating "I say he was not a white man." And Greddon remembered himself—remembered he was only a ghost, impalpable, impotent, of no account. "But I shall meet you in Hell to-morrow," he hissed in Oover's face. And there he was wrong. It is quite certain that ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... knowledge gleaned from his wife's reminiscences of her home, her father, and her brothers to more accurately aim his darts. Sometimes old Quimbey would fairly flee the town, and betake himself in a towering rage to his deserted hearth, to brood futilely over the ashes, and devise impotent ...
— His "Day In Court" - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... mother suddenly broke down completely in health, and after the shortest of illnesses—too short to alarm anyone, too short for even the word danger to be whispered—closed her eyes on this world, leaving Bet in a state of bewildered and impotent rage. ...
— A Girl of the People • L. T. Meade
... arms, O joy of peril, O trumpets, and the cries Of combatants, O my true steed! 'midst you 'T were fair to die; but now I go rebellious To meet my destiny, driven to my doom Like some vile criminal, uttering on the way Impotent vows, and pitiful complaints. ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... not replying when his friends spoke to him. He knew, poor fellow, the slur that the Verdict left on him. "We don't say you are innocent of the crime charged against you; we only say there is not evidence enough to convict you." In that lame and impotent conclusion the proceedings ended at the time. And there they would have remained for all time—but ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... successor, the policy of commercial pressure was carried to its impotent conclusion. At first the action of the British government seemed to crown Madison with triumph. In the winter of 1809, the majority in Congress had talked freely of substituting war for the embargo; and at the same ...
— The Wars Between England and America • T. C. Smith
... remain, even though you should descend to something more despicable, more cowardly than ordinary treason, to wrest her from me. You reproach me with the failures of my life. Great they may have been, but if you attempt this you will find that I am not yet an impotent person." ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... dully brooding over some small grievance,—he seemed to see an all-absorbing fact or fancy recorded on the wall, which was a blank to me. I wondered if it were some deep wrong or sorrow, kept alive by memory and impotent regret; if he mourned for the dead master to whom he had been faithful to the end; or if the liberty now his were robbed of half its sweetness by the knowledge that some one near and dear to him still languished ...
— A Modern Cinderella - or The Little Old Show and Other Stories • Louisa May Alcott
... never quit it with your life," was his reply. "If you attempt it, you shall never cease to rue your folly as long as you exist. Do not imagine I am afraid of you! I wear an armour against which all your weapons are impotent. Do you not know, miserable wretch, that I have sworn to preserve my reputation, whatever it cost? I have dug a pit for you, and whichever way you move it is ready ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... trembling wreck that he was? They were taking care of his life, so they said. His life? How many days? Ten, twenty, fifty, or a hundred? Why? For his own sake? Or to preserve for some time longer the spectacle of his impotent greediness in ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... Government should become overwhelming. Nothing can be farther from our political thoughts to-day than this dread of the power of the national executive. On the contrary, we are constantly finding that it is feeble where we wish it were strong, impotent where we wish it omnipotent. The Senate of the United States has deprived the President of much of the power intended for his office, and has then found it, on the whole, convenient and desirable to allow itself to be held up by any one of its members ...
— Four American Leaders • Charles William Eliot
... and child in the country. Surely, then, the statement which we make at the outset, that the coal trade of the United States is in the hands of monopolists; and that competition, where not killed, is almost impotent to keep down prices, is ...
— Monopolies and the People • Charles Whiting Baker
... wings unclipt, children fasten to a stake. The birds seek to fly, and are pulled back before their wings are well spread; till, at last, they either perpetually strain at the end of their short tether, exciting only ridicule by their anguish and their impotent impatience; or, sullen and despondent, they remain on the ground, without any attempt to fly, nor creep, even to the full limit which their fetters will allow. Thus it is with the feelings of the keen, wild nature I speak of: ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... anything can ever come to destroy that communion. What have faith, love, aspiration, resignation, fellowship with God, to do with death? They cannot be cut through with the stroke that destroys physical life, any more than you can divide a sunbeam with a sword. It unites again, and the impotent edge passes through and has effected nothing. Death can shear asunder many bonds, but that invisible bond that unites the soul to God is of adamant, against which his scythe is in vain. Death is the grim porter that opens the door of a dark hole and herds us ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... felt that, unless they could gain some signal victory before reinforcements reached us, we should take our place as the besiegers, instead of being, as hitherto, the besieged. Disaffection within the city walls was on the increase; only the semblance of authority remained to the old and well-nigh impotent King, while some of his sons, recognizing their perilous position, endeavoured to open negotiations with us. Many of the sepoys were reported to be going off to their homes, sick and weary of a struggle the hopelessness of which ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... paid not the least attention to this episode; they continued tugging at the gun. And would you believe it, the man with no mouth and jaw fell to helping again! The wheels struck a rise in the ground, and he waved his hands in impotent excitement, and then rushed at Jimmie, exposing to the horrified little machinist the full ghastliness of ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... into the face of the dog. Black Bart toppled back against the base of the manger, struggled vainly to regain his poise, and it was then that he pointed his nose up, and wailed like a lost soul, wailed with the fury of impotent hate. Mac Strann caught Haw-Haw by the arm and dragged him back towards ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... smile which set her heart to aching. Adelais knew that no natural power could dissuade him; he would go back with her; but she knew how constantly he had hoped for liberty, with what fortitude he had awaited his chance of liberty; and that he should return to captivity, smiling, thrilled her to impotent, heart-shaking rage. It maddened her that he dared love ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... Boston." For aught I know the next flash of electric fire that simmers along the ocean cable may tell us that Paris, with every fiber quivering with the agony of impotent despair, writhes beneath the conquering heel of her loathed invader. Ere another moon shall wax and wane the brightest star in the galaxy of nations may fall from the zenith of her glory never to rise again. Ere the modest violets of early spring shall ope their beauteous eyes the ...
— Phrases for Public Speakers and Paragraphs for Study • Compiled by Grenville Kleiser
... this subject of control. Not only are the higher, more spiritual affections the most effective masters of the lower; they are the only effective masters. Public reprobation can do much, but it is ineffectual with large numbers of relatively unattached members of society, and it is impotent against secret vice. Motives of cautious fear are always weak with full-blooded and generous youth, and they are likely to become weaker with all men as medical science discovers ways to prevent or escape the most obviously fearful consequences of ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... the latter oftentimes he must struggle, to escape ignominious shipwreck. But the child, helpless alike for both these conflicts, is, through the very ignorance which shields him from all conscious guilt, bound over in the most impotent (though, because impotent and unconscious, the least humiliating) slavery to material circumstance,—a slavery which he cannot escape, and which, during the period of its absolutism, absorbs his very blood, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... votaries, who considered it as the emblem of the gate of St. Peter, and believed that, if welcomed at the one, they should be equally welcomed at the other! Poor souls—they and their spiritual protectors have alike passed away—and we can now look with the eye of Philosophy on the impotent impostures of one party, and on the unsuspecting credulity ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... Major's head as he thrust it through the hatchway—or, to be more precise, at the head of the ladder leading to the Vesuvius's poop— clung a little wry-necked, red-eyed, white-faced man in dishevelled uniform, and capered in impotent fury. But as when a child is chastised he yells once and there follows a pause of many seconds while he gathers up lung and larynx for the prolonged outcry, so after his first bull-roar Captain Crang, of the Vesuvius ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... man's appearance and voice betrayed. How dreadful to the sight are those watery eyes; that red, uneven, pimpled nose; those fallen cheeks; and that hanging, slobbered mouth! Look at the uncombed hair, the beard half shorn, the weak, impotent gait of the man, and the tattered raiment, all eloquent of gin! You would fain hold your nose when he comes nigh you, he carries with him so foul an evidence of his only and his hourly indulgence. You would do so, had you not still a respect for his feelings, which he himself has entirely ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... organisation which its history for the last five centuries has exposed to the distrust and hatred of men as the sworn enemy of mental freedom and growth, the pretensions of Catholicism to renovate society are among the most pitiable and impotent that ever devout, high-minded, and benevolent persons deluded themselves into maintaining or accepting. Over the modern invader it is as powerless as paganism was over the invaders of old. The barbarians of industrialism, grasping chiefs and mutinous men, give no ear to priest or pontiff, who ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley
... to say, seaward—the tower does lean; though but by a foot or so, and now not perilously; the salt winds, impotent against its masonry, having bitten with more effect into the earth around its base. But the church has been restored, the mischief arrested, and the danger no longer haunts its vicar as it haunted the Rev. John Flood on a bright ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the fury of despair, raised her clenched hands towards Heaven and could not utter a word. Impotent rage forced the tears from her eyes; and only after these tears ...
— Halil the Pedlar - A Tale of Old Stambul • Mr Jkai
... barrel, in which the spring is enclosed, and removed the steel spiral, but instead of relaxing itself, according to the laws of its elasticity, it remained coiled on itself like a sleeping viper. It seemed knotted, like impotent old men whose blood has long been congealed. Master Zacharius vainly essayed to uncoil it with his thin fingers, the outlines of which were exaggerated on the wall; but he tried in vain, and soon, with a terrible cry of anguish and rage, he threw it through ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... wife, whose first object, I knew, had ever been to serve and glorify her Maker, should have been thus tortured and desolated by the cruelest calamity which the malignity of a demon could have devised? I railed and blasphemed, and even in my agony defied God with the impotent rage and desperation of a ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 4 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... the electric bell a moment before, and now the door opened and a servant stood awaiting her bidding. In his presence it was impossible for Victor to reply. For one moment he stood glaring at her, a picture of impotent fury, then slowly turned and left the room. As the house door closed behind him, the electric bell pealed once more, and the servant ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... cropping the plants that grew at the foot of the cliff. The moon shining seawards, we were in shadow, so that had Vetch been looking from the brig, he would not have seen me as I raged up and down in impotent fury, nor my companions as they sat themselves down, troubled, like myself, but ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... and sense of obligation on my part which such handsome conduct demanded of me." The admiral then asked him if he would have any objection to remain on the station, when promoted, as he soon must be. Nelson's longing to go home had worn off with his disgust, occasioned by the impotent conclusions of last year's work. Then he was experiencing the feeling voiced by the great Frenchman, Suffren, some dozen years before: "It was clear that, though we had the means to impose the law, all would be lost. I heartily pray you may permit me to leave. War alone ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... possessed of consciences exquisitely tender, and of charity unbounded, should, notwithstanding, object to the conscientious and charitable efforts in the cause of religion of which we have just been speaking! However, these impotent struggles have signally failed, and now there are clergy both of the English and Roman Church in Norfolk Island, while the moral condition of the prisoners there is stated to have improved greatly. In 1837 the Rev. Mr. Sharpe was removed thither, at his own request, from Pitt Town in New ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... involuntarily passed his hand before his brow, to exclude the look of despair he encountered; and when, a moment afterwards, he removed the rigid member, he beheld the sinking form of the victim as it gradually settled in the ocean, still struggling, with regular but impotent strokes of the arms and feet, to gain the wreck, and to preserve an existence that had been so much abused in its hour ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... presented to view, baby set up a roar so tremendous that a number of dogs in the neighbourhood struck in with a loud chorus, and the black kitten, startled out of an innocent slumber, rushed incontinently under the bed, faced about, and fuffed in impotent dismay! ...
— Deep Down, a Tale of the Cornish Mines • R.M. Ballantyne
... named, the Court would not go behind the wording of the Constitution to find a meaning which discriminated against the colored voter; and the recent case of Jackson vs. Giles, brought by a colored citizen of Montgomery, Alabama, in which the Supreme Court confesses itself impotent to provide a remedy for what, by inference, it acknowledges may be a "great political wrong," carefully avoiding, however, to state that it is a wrong, although the vital prayer of the petition was for a decision ...
— The Negro Problem • Booker T. Washington, et al.
... waste of death; Sad soul at war with sense; And suffering doomed to lingering breath; And slandered innocence; And beauty ravished at the bloom; Saw strength flung prostrate; fall The brave, life-worsted from the womb; White truth made criminal: Impotent, passionate, counting all, We ...
— Iolaeus - The man that was a ghost • James A. Mackereth
... furious revolt against his mistake that had led him to such a fearful misunderstanding of Ida; a silent impotent rage against himself and against the brute in him that he had permitted to drag ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... three, was "holding his breath," and the family were all aghast at the length of his performance. He re-covered it as his father entered the room, and drowned, without distressing himself, the impotent efforts of the others. Mrs. Blows turned upon her husband ...
— Odd Craft, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... the weak sobs answered me I threw myself from the litter to the ground, falling in an impotent heap with my feet entangled in the wrappings. But I caught sight of my good dame staggering on behind, half dragged, half carried by two Indian youths. Her clothing was torn and draggled, her face pitiably scratched, while ...
— Margaret Tudor - A Romance of Old St. Augustine • Annie T. Colcock
... still more angry, in consequence of the passion manifested by my child, and I speak and strike again. He is weak and I am strong; but, though he bow his head, crushed into silence, I may be sure that there is a sullen heart in the little bosom, and anger the more bitter because it is impotent. I put the child away from me, and think of what I have done. I am full of relentings. I long to ask his pardon, for I know that I have offended and deeply injured one of Christ's little ones. I call him to me again, press his head to my breast, kiss him, and weep. ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... bigness of a man, Aslant from left to right, athwart the span, And painted black as paint could make it. Hushed, I stood, while manifold conjecture rushed To this point and to that point, and then burst In the impotent questionings rejected first. What did it mean? Ah, that no one could tell. Who put it there? That was unknown as well. Was there no legend? My friend knew of none. No neighborhood story? He had sought for one In vain. Did he imagine it accident, With nothing really ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... violated Constitution of his country, and that is his crime. He preserved that instrument, in form, and substance, and spirit, a precious inheritance for generations to come, and for this he can never be forgiven. How vain and impotent is party rage, directed against such a man. He is not more elevated by his lofty residence, upon the summit of his own favorite mountain, than he is lifted, by the serenity of his mind, and the consciousness of a well-spent life, above the malignant ...
— American Eloquence, Volume I. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... written that 'the care and forethought which would be lavished on a favourite horse or dog on changing masters were denied to British subjects by the British Government.' The intensity and bitterness of the resentment, the wrath and hatred—so much deeper because so impotent—at the betrayal and desertion have left their traces on South African feeling; and the opinion of the might and honour of England, as it may be gleaned in many parts of the Colonies as well as everywhere in the Republics, would be an unpleasant ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... Accordingly, the state flourished. Instead of lying as dead, in a sort of trance, or exposed, as some others, in an epileptic fit, to the pity or derision of the world, for her wild, ridiculous, convulsive movements, impotent to every purpose but that of dashing out her brains against the pavement, Great Britain rose above the standard even of her former self. An era of a more improved domestic prosperity then commenced, and ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... he paced the floor of his little bed-chamber, fuming and swearing to himself in a mild, impotent fashion—and in some dread of the door. Such words and sentences as these fell from his lips:—"Nobody!" "Keeps me on the place!" "Because she's tender-hearted!" "I will fire her!" "Can't talk back to me!" "Damned Irisher!" And so on and so ...
— What's-His-Name • George Barr McCutcheon
... it; the deep and dismal tragedy of it! Who might look into the wild, despairing heart of the prisoner and see and understand the frightful turmoil there; the surging, choking passion; unbridled but impotent ferocity; frantic thirst for a vengeance that should be deeper than hell! Neranya gazed, his shapeless body heaving, his eyes aflame; and then, in a strong, clear voice, which rang throughout the great ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow
... watched the progress of this astonishing revolution with impotent surprise. Stefano Colonna, who was absent on the eventful day, expressed his scorn of the mob and their leader. But a popular attack on his palace convinced him of his error and forced him to fly from the city. Within fifteen days ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... the world. The man in the pangs of the stone, gout, or any acute distempers, is not in so deplorable a condition in the eye of right sense, as he that errs and repents, and repents and errs on. The fellow with broken limbs justly deserves your alms for his impotent condition; but he that cannot use his own reason, is in a much worse state; for you see him in miserable circumstances, with his remedy at the same time in his own possession, if he would or could use it. This is the cause, that of all ill characters, the rake has the best quarter in the ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... special attention to one point in all the miracles of healing wrought by the Lord, and that point has relation to the cause of all our woe. It is the sin of man. To the impotent man who had lain by the pool thirty and six years, unable to get in, after being healed, the Lord when he met him in the Temple said: "Sin no more, lest a worse thing come upon thee." Paul says: "By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin." Death of the body is the point at which all ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... Moses declares how sorely he was tempted; yea, and what opinion he had conceived of God; that is, That God was either impotent, and could not deliver his people from such a tyrant's hand; or else, That he was mutable, and unjust in his promises. And this same, and sorer temptations, assaulted the people; for in anguish of heart, they both refused God and Moses. And what means did God use to comfort them in that ...
— The Pulpit Of The Reformation, Nos. 1, 2 and 3. • John Welch, Bishop Latimer and John Knox
... At the close of the last chapter we remarked the deterioration of the harem-ridden court in the early days of Artaxerxes; and as time passed, the spectacle of a Great King governing by treachery, buying his enemies, and impotent to recover Egypt even with their mercenary help had its effect. Belief gained ground that the ship of Empire was sinking, and even in Susa the fear grew that a wind from the West was to finish her. The Great King's court officers watched Greek politics during the first seventy years of the fourth ...
— The Ancient East • D. G. Hogarth
... of the scientist were the human passions and designs, the promptings of instinct and nature; but to the eye of the poet how sublime and august! These tiny creatures could be dominated by emotions—love, honour, patriotism, liberty—which could enable them, frail and impotent as they were, to rise majestically above the darkest and saddest limitations of immortality. They could be racked with pain, crushed, tormented, silenced; but nothing could make them submit, nothing could force them to believe ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... never been conferred, except for the defence of the "Holy Catholic Church." But this greatest of papal gifts made no impression on the age which read Montesquieu and Voltaire. A flood of satirical pamphlets inundated Christendom, and the world laughed at the impotent weapons which had once been thunderbolts in the hands of ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... terror Eva gave a suppressed cry and turned to escape the arms of the man she had maddened. With his hot lips brushing her own she turned away her face in impotent writhing, and saw her ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... same time he held the trade slowly sailing along the North African littoral at his mercy. Great were the depredations of Curtogali, and even Pope Leo X. trembled on his throne, while Genoa, Venice, and Sicily seethed with impotent fury. ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... were no arms in the canoe, or neither he nor the horse would, in all probability, have returned alive; such was the opinion, at least, pronounced by those who were witnesses of the strange scene, and who remarked the infuriated but impotent gestures of Desborough, as the old man, having once more gotten his steed into depth, slowly pursued his course towards the shore, but with the same wild brandishing of his enormous cudgel, and the same rocking ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... back upon his pillow with a heavy sigh, but uttered no protest against this sentence. And this was all that came of Gilbert's vengeful passion against the man who had wronged him; this was the end of a long-cherished anger. "A lame and impotent conclusion," perhaps, but surely the only end possible under the circumstances. He could not wage war against a feeble creature, whose hold on life was still an uncertainty; he could not forget his promise to Marian, that no harm should come to her husband ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... increase of the voluntary power of man over his animal frame comes next under Mr Godwin's consideration, and he concludes by saying, that the voluntary power of some men, in this respect, is found to extend to various articles in which other men are impotent. But this is reasoning against an almost universal rule from a few exceptions; and these exceptions seem to be rather tricks, than powers that may be exerted to any good purpose. I have never heard of any man who could ...
— An Essay on the Principle of Population • Thomas Malthus
... condition of one morally depraved, who is trying to do right, but is prevented by evil habits which have become a part of himself. He describes this as moral death, but not guilt. He says, "It is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me." He describes himself as morally impotent—wishing to do right, but unable to do it. He says he delights in the law of God after the inner man. The inmost is right, but outside of that are evil habits, in the body, which drag down the soul ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... himself, and as if bound to obey orders, the lad took a step forward again, when, to his utter amazement, the bison bulls, now not twenty yards away, stopped short, shook their heads at him, made some impotent tosses in the air, pawed up a little grass, and then turned altogether, and trotted back to take up their old position in ...
— The Silver Canyon - A Tale of the Western Plains • George Manville Fenn
... aroused by the stertorous breathing of the emperor. The crowned demon of the island was being borne away to his palace upon the shoulders of his attendants. Although maddened by an insatiable thirst, and by a gloom that was becoming habitual, the monster lay upon his cushions as impotent as a child, in the midst of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... which was then in session, issued a proclamation declaring him a rebel, and commanding his followers to deliver him up, and to retire to their respective homes. Bacon and his army, equally incensed at this piece of impotent indiscretion, returned to Jamestown, and ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 1 (of 5) • John Marshall
... which would justify a Government, circumstanced and supported as we are, in abandoning prematurely the trust confided to us by the country. When a Government is impotent, when it is destitute of ideas and devoid of the power to give effect to them, when it is brought to a complete arrest upon the vital and essential lines of its policy, then I entirely agree that the sooner it divests itself of responsibilities which it ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... overpowered and slew a caravan of merchants between Dibra and Prizren. On examining their spoil they are said to have discovered a large amount of meat, but, as it was Friday, to have refrained from consuming it. Prenk Bib Doda was, as a matter of fact, impotent; and his widow, Lucia Bib Doda, survives him.... One agrees with Monsignor Bumci that the Albanian is not altogether so blindly a supporter of his Church as we have been told, and his murderous intentions against a neighbouring tribe will be not at all diminished if they happen ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... he confines himself to feeling the fetters which the latter imposes on him, without having the consciousness of the infinite emancipation which it procures for him. Without suspecting in himself the dignity of lawgiver, he only experiences the constraint and the impotent revolt of a subject fretting under the yoke, because in this experience the sensuous impulsion precedes the moral impulsion, he gives to the law of necessity a beginning in him, a positive origin, and by the most unfortunate of all mistakes he converts the immutable and the ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... like ice on flame. Jack swore a muffled oath and turned away. There was no one in the world who possessed the power to humble him as did Dick, who with a few scorching words could make him writhe in impotent fury. For there was no gainsaying Dick. He was always unassailable in his justice, since in a fashion inexplicable but tacitly acknowledged by both he occupied a higher plane altogether. Ignore it as he might, deep in his inner soul Jack ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... place in the eternity before may happen in the eternity after us; and nothing save innumerous accidents is opposed to the prospect that the universe may at last acquire the integral consciousness that will establish it at its climax. After giving a glance, useless, for that matter, and impotent, at all that may perhaps arise, we shall try to interrogate, without hope of answer, the mystery of the boundless peace into which it is possible that we may ...
— Death • Maurice Maeterlinck
... solicitude the return of life. It returned at length, but merely to betray symptoms that it would speedily depart forever. For a time my faculties were palsied, and I was made an impotent spectator of the ruin that environed me. This pusillanimity quickly gave way to resolutions and reflections better suited to ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... why? Haven't I a right to ask why? Did I do it? Was it my fault? Could I help being born? And look at me now, blighted and blasted, just as life was at its sweetest. Talk about the sins of the father—how about the sins of the Creator?" He shook his two clinched hands in the air—the poor impotent atom with his pin-point of brain caught in the whirl of ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... men out of whose brains had originally come the book and lyrics no longer hated each other and themselves; they lusted for the blood of the stage director or saw gorgeous mental pictures of a little fat oozy corpse surrounded by the gleeful faces of the army of people who had been impotent to protest against the lash of his whip, the impertinence of his tongue or the ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... For tho' in dreadful Whirles we hung High on the broken Wave, I knew thou wert not slow to Hear, Nor impotent to Save. ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... the boy's savage soul asserted itself, and he fought like a little demon. Pitying the child in its impotent rage, the man gave him ...
— The Last Spike - And Other Railroad Stories • Cy Warman
... Mr. Tapster's mournful thoughts was disturbed by a curious little sound—that of some one creeping softly down the staircase leading from the upper floors. Once more he half rose from his chair, only to fall heavily back again, with a look of impotent annoyance on his round, whiskered face. Where was the use of his going out into the hall and catching Nurse on her way to the kitchen? Maud had declared, very early in the day, that there should be as little communication as possible between the kitchen and ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... with the child in his arms from the horrible height in the sea, Shrill screeching, "Revenge!" in the wind-rush; and pallid Maclean, Age-feeble with anger and impotent pain, Crawled up on the crag, and lay flat, and locked hold of dead ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... the congregation, but here the list of the whole seven but strengthens confidence. Faith delights to look steadily at its enemies, knowing that the one Helper is more than they all. This catalogue breathes the same spirit as Paul's rapturous list of the foes impotent to separate from the love of God. Mark, too, the long-drawn-out designation of the ark, with its accumulation of nouns, which grammatical purists have found difficult,—'the ark of the covenant of the Lord of all the earth'; where it leads they need not ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the widow what she once possess'd,— Out of her language blotted "moan" and "sigh"! So then it is Love's brimming tide that rolls Along the placid veins of wedded souls,— That very Love that faced the iron sleet, Trampling inane Convention under feet, And scoffing at the impotent discreet! So then it is Love's beauty-kindled flame That keeps the plighted from the taint of time Year after year! Ah yes, the very same That made our young bureaucrat blaze in rhyme! So it is Love's young bliss that will not brave The voyage over vaulted Ocean's wave, ...
— Love's Comedy • Henrik Ibsen
... her evident invalidism, one could but wonder why she made so little effort to help herself. She sat droopingly on the rock, gazing from her foot to the far lavender line of the mesas. A tiny, impotent atom of life, she sat as if the eternal why which the desert hurls at one overwhelmed her, deprived her of hope, almost of sensation. There was something of nobility in the steadiness with which she gazed at the melting distances, something ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow
... that she had taken impotent rage for strength of purpose. Mr. Nash was aware that he had neglected his daughter, and was anxious to stifle the thought by laying the blame on every one else. And Bertie was quicker than Judith was in reading character when it ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... hearty, and homely. Cordiality in each is the prominent characteristic. As a people, these mountaineers have ever been accessible to gentleness and truth, so far as I have known them; but excite suspicion or resentment, and they give emphatic and not impotent resistance. Compulsion they defy. ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... the agony of disappointment endured by poor Betsy when she found that Waroonga was not among them? the droop of the spirits, the collapse of the coal-scuttle! Language is impotent. We leave it to imagination, merely remarking that she soon recovered on the faith of the happiness which was yet ...
— The Madman and the Pirate • R.M. Ballantyne
... we can but marvel at the swiftness of the corruption which in little more than a year had begun to lead them not into paths of reform and Liberal policy, but along the road towards which the butcher they had deposed had pointed the way. It must have made Abdul Hamid gnaw his nails and shake impotent hands to see those who had torn him from his throne so soon pursuing the very policy which he invented, and to which he nominally owed his dethronement. Strange, too, was it that his overthrow should come from the ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson
... to depict the impotent rage of Professor Hardwigg. The day passed away, and not the faintest outline of a shadow could be seen at the bottom of the crater. Hans the guide never moved from his place. He must have been curious to know what we were about, if indeed he could ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... remains, foaming in impotent rage. He is surrounded by the choir of white-robed angels. He stands powerless there, while they gather to themselves Faust's immortal part and ascend amidst songs of triumph ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... the satisfaction of which would be peaceful and satisfactory, but that human laws and institutions have put it under constraints which produce agony.[1143] The truth is that license stimulates desire without limit, and ends in impotent agony. Renunciation produces agony of another kind. Somewhere between lies temperance, which seems an easy solution, but there is no definition of temperance which is generally applicable, and, wherever the limit may be set, there, on either side of it, the antagonistic ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... truth. Truth lies in your thoughts, in your feelings, girl, in your choked feelings, in your blood, in the 'yes' you speak in your dreams. Of course I know that they need their lie, for they must be organised, the wolves; they must go in packs, otherwise they are impotent. But I have only my truth, only my truth as I stand on the marble slab above ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... applauded,—especially when addressed to obvious self-interest. In those words the notary read the concentrated hatred of a man whose calculations had been balked by Nature herself, and who revenged himself upon the innocent object of an impotent love. This opinion was confirmed to some extent by the obstinate resolution of the doctor to leave nothing to the Rabouilleuse, saying with a bitter smile, when the notary again urged the subject ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... "Outrage," "ingrate," "insult," were the first three distinguishable epithets applied to her sister or her sister's words; then, "See if Mr. Van Antwerp will tolerate such conduct. I'll write this very day," was the impotent threat that followed; and finally, utterly defeated, thoroughly convinced that she was powerless against her sister's reckless love of "fair play at any price," she felt that her wrath was giving way to dismay, and ...
— The Deserter • Charles King
... side: powerful and terrible as she had felt herself this morning, she was now crushed by a sense of miserable and impotent weakness. Her defiance had been addressed to a mortal, a frail, tender woman; and God and Fate had put her in the front of the battle instead of Heliodora. She shuddered at ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... that poured from the North, and the Church of God alone stood safe and firm, with the rainbow of heaven around her, the stern warriors of Germany asserted their rights, or redressed their wrongs with the sword, and scorned to bow before the impotent decrees of a civil tribunal. A regular system of private warfare gradually sprang up, which falsely led every man of honor to revenge any real or fancied offence offered to any of his kindred. The most ...
— The Truce of God - A Tale of the Eleventh Century • George Henry Miles
... all that I have said I seem to be speaking to no purpose; for not one whit art thou melted or softened in thy heart by entreaties, but art champing the bit like a colt fresh yoked, and struggling against the reins. But on the strength of an impotent scheme art thou thus violent; for obstinacy in one not soundly wise, itself by itself availeth less than nothing. And mark, if thou art not persuaded by my words, what a tempest and three-fold surge of ills, ...
— Prometheus Bound and Seven Against Thebes • Aeschylus
... full minute the polishing continued, then face and figure vanished, and Reynolds was left staring in impotent rage at ...
— Miss Mink's Soldier and Other Stories • Alice Hegan Rice
... sit some time in expectation of their submission; but when the sea still advanced toward him, and began to wash him with its billows, he turned to his courtiers, and remarked to them that every creature in the universe was feeble and impotent, and that power resided with one Being alone, in whose hands were all the elements of nature; who could say to the ocean, "Thus far shalt thou go, and no farther," and who could level with his nod the most towering piles of human pride ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... snow of the parapet, speechless and almost lifeless. He clasped his hands, but could not raise his head; the whole scene faded from his eye. If he had been weak before, he was impotent now. ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... cataclysm in the national life: "Wherefore, seeing our number is so great, so indigent, and so heavily oppressed by your false means that none taketh care of our misery, and that it is better to provide for these our impotent members which God hath given us, to oppose to you in plain controversy, than to see you hereafter, as ye have done before, steal from us our lodging, and ourselves in the mean time to perish and die for want ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... 'goaded bull the German attempted to fling forward. But men-at-arms, in steel and leather, who had come up quietly behind him, seized him now. Impotent in their coiling arms, he was borne away to his doom, that thereby he might complete the reparation of his hideous offence, and deliver Sapphira from the bondage of a wedlock which Charles of Burgundy had never intended her ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... basis of life, and more important than the tavern. Agreed: but that does not say that the tavern was not an excellent corrective influence to the villa, and that its disappearance has not had a vulgarising effect on artistic work of all kinds, and the club has been proved impotent to replace it, the club being no more than the correlative of the villa. Let the reader trace villa through each modern feature. I will pass on at once to the circulating library, at once the symbol and glory ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... like that of Germany in the worst days of the Holy Roman Empire. The emperor was powerless, the various vassal states were independent in all but name, and often at war one with the other. These states again were disintegrated, and their rulers impotent against encroaching feudatories. In Confucius' native state, Lu, the duke was a mere shadow. The younger branches of his house had usurped all power. Three in number, they were called the Three Clans. The most important of the three was the Chi, or Chi-sun ...
— The Sayings Of Confucius • Confucius
... Ivanovich, my head aches, and I am going back to the house to lie down." Tushin looked at Vera, asking himself how any man could be such a blind fool as Volokov. Or is he merely a beast, he thought to himself in impotent rage. He pulled himself together, however, and asked her if she had any ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov
... bows like a spent wave. But baffled though she was for the moment, Georgie had been aware that Mrs Quantock seethed with revolutionary ideas: she deeply resented this confiscation of what was certainly her property, though she was impotent to stop it, and Georgie knew just what she felt. It was all very well to say that Lucia's schemes were entirely in accord with the purposes of the Guides. That might be so, but Mrs Quantock would not cease to think that ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... and some of the insistence upon armor; while the cry that went up for local naval defence along our coast, when war threatened in the spring of 1898, showed an ignorance of the first principles of warfare, which, if not resisted, would have left us impotent ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... in their room, and at their Expence, mere Sovereign Power alone. Physically speaking indeed, we allow God can do Evil itself; but the moral Perfections of his Nature, are to us an infallible and unshaken Security, that he never will do it. Man being an impotent and fallible Creature, liable, not only to mistake the true Nature and importance of Things, but when he does understand his Duty rightly, liable also, thro' the Prevalence of Habit and Passion, to be very backward and defective in performing ...
— Free and Impartial Thoughts, on the Sovereignty of God, The Doctrines of Election, Reprobation, and Original Sin: Humbly Addressed To all who Believe and Profess those DOCTRINES. • Richard Finch
... necessary now that Sir Lionel should summon up his best courage. He reminded himself that after all his brother was but a feeble old man—impotent in all but money; and as it seemed now clear that no further pecuniary aid was to be expected, why need he fear him on this account? Had it been possible for him to get away without further talk, he would have done so; but this ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... But, though it may sound absurd to you, it was the blow on the heart about the peace after all that excitement and exultation, that walking on the clouds for weeks and months, and then the sudden stroke and fall, and the impotent rage against all the nations of the earth—selfish, inhuman, wicked—who forced the hand of Napoleon, and truncated his great intentions. Many young men of Florence were confined to their beds by the emotion ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... man is shot like a dog, and it goes well with the shooter. The innocent are accused and the accuser triumphs. If you will take the trouble to scratch the surface anywhere, you will see under the skin a sentient being writhing in impotent anguish." ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... that they may be adduced as a further indication of a point of view whose prevalence alone could render them even dramatically plausible. Such for example is the remark which Euripides puts into the mouth of his Medea—"women are impotent for good, but clever contrivers of all evil" [Footnote: Euripides, Medea. 406.]; or that of one of the characters of Menander, "a woman is necessarily an evil, and he is a lucky man who catches her in the mildest form." While the ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... be useless to linger on the impotent fury of Lord Alphingham when he discovered his well-conceived plans were utterly frustrated, and that his intended victim had eluded him, under the stern guardianship of the Duchess of Rothbury. In the first bitter moment of disappointment, he refused to accuse ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume I. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes. • Grace Aguilar
... could not divert my attention from other still less pleasing features about her. I admired her confidence in spite of her disadvantages. She must have credited me with a diabolic appetite, but these women often contrive to extract charms out of their depravity which their delicacy would be impotent to furnish. She begged me to sup with her, and as she persisted I was obliged to refuse her in a way I should not have allowed myself to use with any other woman. She then begged me to take four tickets for the play the next day, which was to be for ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... the trouble came at once. Of course we can never put down the reason in black and white, but all India will understand. And it is better to have a sharp short outbreak than five years of impotent administration inside the Border. It costs less. Grish Chunder De has reported himself sick, and has been transferred to his own province without any sort of reprimand. He was strong on not ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... to simulate ungovernable rage and impotent distress at once. He waved one fist and tore his hair with the ...
— The Young Pitcher • Zane Grey
... tendency to bear roses or produce thorns. Failure to recognize the fact of two sets of tendencies in the life will lead to a fatal mistake in nurture. Christ will be presented only as an Example and not as a Savior also, thus setting before a life its pattern and leaving it impotent to reach it. ...
— The Unfolding Life • Antoinette Abernethy Lamoreaux
... contrary, we had been taught to regard them as most unfortunate in the circumstances under which [11] they so gloriously conquered their merited freedom. We saw them free, but perfectly illiterate barbarians, impotent to use the intellectual resources of which their valour had made them possessors, in the shape of books on the spirit and technical details of a highly developed national existence. We had learnt also, until this new interpreter of history had contradicted the accepted record, ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... at her for a minute or two, then, with a smothered oath upon his lips, he turned slowly to the door and opened it. Before leaving the room, however, he said, in a voice half-stifled by impotent passion— ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... the morning the storm was furious; but the Major declared that his weather-glass had turned, which proved that the gale was breaking. The top of the tide would be at one o'clock, and after church we should behold a sight he was rather proud of—the impotent wrath of the wind and tide against ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... at that instant rushed by him—pale, haggard, breathless—towards the house which he had quitted, and the door of which he left open, as he had found it—open, as the physician had left it when hurrying, ten minutes before the arrival of Mr. Beaufort, from the spot where his skill was impotent. Wrapped in gloomy thought, alone, and on foot-at that dreary hour, and in that remote suburb—the heir of the Beauforts sought his splendid home. Anxious, fearful, hoping, the outcast orphan flew on to the ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... machine is impotent against my will. I could have defied it a hundred years ago, when I was barely a grown man. Know you, American, that we supermen of the Fenachrone are as far above any of the other and lesser breeds of beings who spawn in their millions in their countless myriads of races upon ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... was that she went mad. A screaming, gibbering maniac writhed in my grasp. It bit and clawed and scratched in impotent fury. And then it laughed a weird and terrible laughter that froze the blood. The slave girls upon the dais shrieked and cowered away. And the thing jumped at them and gnashed its teeth and then spat upon them from frothing lips. God, but it was a ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... would appear on the face of it that the efforts of the Government are absolutely impotent, the notices so much waste paper, and the 'rights of liberty' mere empty phrases of no meaning or significance to the Chinese mind ... A Chinawoman would never dream of effecting her escape for the ...
— Heathen Slaves and Christian Rulers • Elizabeth Wheeler Andrew and Katharine Caroline Bushnell
... it with your life," was his reply. "If you attempt it, you shall never cease to rue your folly as long as you exist. Do not imagine I am afraid of you! I wear an armour against which all your weapons are impotent. Do you not know, miserable wretch, that I have sworn to preserve my reputation, whatever it cost? I have dug a pit for you, and whichever way you move it is ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... When they passed the Scorpion and only just missed destruction from its menacing fangs, fear entered into the boy's heart. His mother had spoken truth. He was only partly a god, and he was very, very young. In impotent horror he tugged at the reins to try to check the horses' descent, then, forgetful of Apollo's warning, he smote them angrily. But anger met anger, and the fury of the immortal steeds had scorn for the wrath of a mortal boy. With a great toss of their mighty heads they had torn the guiding reins ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... therewithal, to win me, if you please (Without the which I am not to be won), You shall this twelvemonth term from day to day Visit the speechless sick, and still converse With groaning wretches; and your talk shall be, With all the fierce endeavour of your wit, To enforce the pained impotent ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... prominent characteristic. As a people, these mountaineers have ever been accessible to gentleness and truth, so far as I have known them; but excite suspicion or resentment, and they give emphatic and not impotent resistance. Compulsion they defy. ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... ships, the trade of the North stagnate at the wharves, and the manufacturers starve at their looms, while the whole people shall pay tribute to foreign industry to be clad in a foreign garb; that the Congress of the Union are impotent to restore the balance in favor of native industry destroyed by the statutes ...
— State of the Union Addresses of John Quincy Adams • John Quincy Adams
... ultra-elegant, and wily-weak court and dynasty have lately been expelled from precarious sovereignty at Changan in the North to Nankin south of the Yangtse; there to abide a little while un-overturned, looking down in lofty impotent contempt on the uncouth Wether Huns, Tunguses, and Tibetans who are sharing and quarreling over the ancient seats of the Black-haired People in the Hoangho basin, after driving this same precious House of Tsin into the south.—Persia is on the back of the Wave, something lower ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... He felt maddeningly impotent. In another world entirely, a mob of half-naked renegades had made a prisoner. He was not dead, that solely surviving man from the Golden City. He was bound, and the Ragged Men guarded him closely, and his guards were diverting themselves unspeakably ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... to about seventeen hundred effectives. That of Lord Cornwallis is understood to have been still less numerous. So impotent were the means employed for the conquest and defence of states which were of immense extent ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 3 (of 5) • John Marshall
... dead—and I'll fly, and I'll go abroad out of the reach of the confounded hells, and I'll bury myself in a forest, by Gad! and hang myself up to a tree—and, oh—I'm the most miserable beggar in all England!" And so with more tears, shrieks, and curses, the impotent wretch vented his grief and deplored his unhappy fate; and, in the midst of groans and despair and blasphemy, ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... discoveries of science. The church has impeded, but it has not and it cannot stop the onward march of the human race. Heresy can not be burned, nor imprisoned, nor starved. It laughs at presbyteries and synods, at Ecumenical councils and the impotent thunders of Sinai. Heresy is the eternal dawn, the morning star, the glittering herald of the day. Heresy is the last and best thought. It is the perpetual new world; the unknown sea, toward which ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... herself with a little cry of impotent despair. How could she say the sharp, cruel speeches that were struggling to reach her tongue now? It was no use; she was a coward; she simply had not the courage to undeceive him here, on the very first ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... German places above everything else, Method and Power. Elected by Nature to command the impotent races, he possesses all the qualifications that distinguish the superior leader. The French Revolution was merely a clash between Teutons and Celts. The nobility of France were descended from Germanic warriors established in the country after the so-called invasion ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Jehuda, Emek ha-Bacha, etc. The art of printing, even then developed to a considerable degree of perfection, became for the dispersed Jews the strongest bond of spiritual union. The papal index librorum prohibitorum was impotent in the face of the all-pervading propaganda for thought and feeling carried on by ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow
... is itself a surprise. The characters are generally strongly conceived, skilfully discriminated, and happily combined. The delineation of Mr. Westervelt, the father of the heroine, is especially excellent. Irresolute in thought, impotent in will, and only occasionally fretted by circumstances into a feeble activity, he is an almost painfully accurate representation of a class of men who drift through life without any power of self-direction. Mrs. Westervelt has equal moral feebleness with less brain, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... you, and that you left me, in a rather awkward position, to explain matters to your mother?" he said coldly. He had formulated the sentence in his mind some moments before, but now that it was uttered, it appeared singularly weak and impotent. ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... defaced with horrid blackness: black ashes of Chateaus, black bodies of gibetted Men! Industry has ceased in it; not sounds of the hammer and saw, but of the tocsin and alarm-drum. The sceptre has departed, whither one knows not;—breaking itself in pieces: here impotent, there tyrannous. National Guards are unskilful, and of doubtful purpose; Soldiers are inclined to mutiny: there is danger that they two may quarrel, danger that they may agree. Strasburg has seen riots: a Townhall torn to shreds, its ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... fully complied with. In Wurtemberg, the duke, Charles, had been succeeded, A.D. 1793, by his brother, Louis Eugene, who banished license from his court, but, a foe to enlightenment, closed the Charles college, placed monks around his person, was extremely bigoted, and a zealous but impotent friend to France. He expired, A.D. 1795, and was succeeded by the third brother, Frederick Eugene, who had been during his youth a canon at Salzburg, but afterward became a general in the Prussian service, ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... unaware that the Covenant would be inserted in the Peace Treaty, but he was strongly of the opinion, as indeed were M. Pichon and others, that the two instruments were incompatible. He also apparently inclined to the belief that spiritual and moral agencies, if not wholly impotent to bring about the requisite changes in the politico-social world, could not effect the transformation for a long while to come, and that in the interval it behooved the governments to fall back upon the old system of so-called equilibrium, which, after Germany's collapse, meant ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... my sympathy with you was not wholly unselfish, but that I felt that, if I had ever written anything which has a chance of a prolonged existence, I should wish it to be read, not by any distracted and impotent communities of British race, but by America, one and indivisible. And, gentlemen, this is not unnatural, for amid all the divisions or distractions of your history, your literature has ever been patriotic and ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... where the empty tomato tin lay by the rotten plantain cast over by some nigger child. He knew what it was to lie and hear the flies buzzing and wonder what tune of the devil it was they were trying to imitate. He knew what it was to think of death with the impotent craving of a sick child for ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... quotas in their paper money, which was not received at par outside the States. Congress had no power of coercion. According to the second of the Articles, each State in the Confederation retained its sovereignty, freedom, and independence. Congress could only make impotent appeals. Governor Randolph, of Virginia, pictured the Congress as saying to his State: "May it please your high mightinesses of Virginia to pay your just proportionate quota of the national debt; we humbly supplicate that it may please you to comply with your federal duties. We implore, ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks
... is loss of both physical and mental power. Not only the voluntary muscles become impotent, but the involuntary ones lose in effectiveness. Digestion is partly or wholly suspended. "Scared stiff" is a popular and truthful expression. The bodily rhythm is lost, the breathing becomes jerky and the heart beats out ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... second time he had been caught by Fadakar, the chief of animal control, before he could lock up the delinquents. And the memory of the resulting interview still had the power to make him flush with impotent anger. Shann's explanation had been contemptuously brushed aside, and he had been delivered an ultimatum. If his carelessness occurred again, he would be sent back on the next supply ship, to be dismissed without an official sign-off on his work record, ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... tent; ransacking bags, portmanteaux and boxes, shaking out clothing and blankets, and prying into every conceivable article in a vain endeavor to find the stones; whilst the indignant quartette under examination broke out again and again in a storm of impotent wrath. ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... imagine for the fraction of a second, Walt Wagner, that if I was back twenty years and sound like you are, I'd be asking another man why he didn't do the job?" Terrible, almost ghastly, he stood there before them, the picture of bitter rage, of impotent, distorted senility. "Have you got the last spark of manhood left in you, and ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... Cudgel her wearied brain as she would, it could not make pace to the goal she sought. When, after a sleepless night, she rose, it was with the maze of disaster still unthreaded. Her usual ingenuity of resource was become impotent. Raging against her own supineness, she was yet ...
— Making People Happy • Thompson Buchanan
... an involuntary and impotent gesture, such as mad men and wise men can both be forced into giving, he shook his fist in the direction in which he had caught sight of ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... important that deduction should be so impotent in biology. Still more impotent is it perhaps in matters of art or religion; whilst, on the contrary, it works marvels so long as it has only to foresee movements or transformations in bodies. What does this mean, if not ...
— A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson • Edouard le Roy
... and the old system. We often smile ourselves, and seek to make others smile, when we revert to the discussions, rival pretensions, projects, hopes, and fears which agitated this small knot of exiles, gathered round an impotent and throneless monarch. Such an indulgence is neither rational nor dignified. What matters it whether the theatre be great or small, whether the actors fail or succeed, or whether the casualties ...
— Memoirs To Illustrate The History Of My Time - Volume 1 • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... at Dale, but he had forgotten her existence and was poring over the battles of Pompey. Such indifference did not hurt her now:—it was the emptiness of that door! Still staring, silently beating her hands together in impotent rage, her face burning with mortification, two big tears rolled down her cheeks and fell upon the rug. Mac whined. He did not ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... brandishing their weapons or feebly calling their adversaries to come on, while the soldiers prodded them from behind with spears, and urged them into the close quarters they so anxiously desired to avoid. Plotinus, helpless with his bonds and gag, looked on in impotent horror. Gallienus was often cruel, but could he intend such a revolting massacre? There must be ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... his old age in his second son, Christopher, about to marry and reside with him. "Lycidas" had appeared meanwhile, or was to appear, and its bold denunciation of the Romanizing clergy might well offend the ruling powers. The atmosphere at home was, at all events, difficult breathing for an impotent patriot; and Milton may have come to see what we so clearly see in "Comus," that his asperities and limitations needed contact with the world. Why speak of the charms of Italy, in themselves sufficient allurement to a poet and scholar? His father, trustful ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... Piccadilly. Her husband had had the luxuries of wealth, and here he was living like a Spartan on his hill— and alone; though he had a wife whom men had beseiged both before and after marriage. A feeling of impotent indignation suddenly took possession of her. Here he was with two women, unattached,—one interesting and good and agreeable and good-looking, and the other almost a beauty,—who were part of the whole rustic scheme in which he lived. They ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... which operated so effectually, that when his army was beaten by the powerful Damel, they uniformly retired behind their exorcised heap of stones, which in a moment stopt their enemy's career, and struck them with such dread, that they immediately retired to their country, leaving their impotent enemy in quiet possession of his usurped territory; whom otherwise they might have annihilated with the greatest facility. Superstition is a delusion very prevalent in Africa; and its powerful influence upon the human mind is forcibly ...
— Observations Upon The Windward Coast Of Africa • Joseph Corry
... found a panic. The Russian detachment of Colonel Kazagrandi, after having twice defeated the Bolsheviki and well on its march against Irkutsk, was suddenly rendered impotent and scattered through internal strife among the officers. The Bolsheviki took advantage of this situation, increased their forces to one thousand men and began a forward movement to recover what they had lost, while the remnants of Colonel Kazagrandi's detachment were retreating ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... nearly $500,000,000, or over $8.00 per annum for every man, woman, and child in the country. Surely, then, the statement which we make at the outset, that the coal trade of the United States is in the hands of monopolists; and that competition, where not killed, is almost impotent to keep down prices, is one ...
— Monopolies and the People • Charles Whiting Baker
... blow on the hoary skull was in their eyes an act of filial piety. The Necrophori have their share of these ancient barbarities. Full of days and henceforth useless, dragging out a weary existence, they mutually exterminate one another. Why prolong the agony of the impotent and ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... Who live (though why, yourselves alone can guess) In hope deferred, ambitious still to shine By hating me at half a cent a line— Like drones among the bees of brighter wing, Sunless to shine and impotent to sting. To estimate in easy verse I'll try The controversial value of a lie. So lend your ears—God knows you have enough!— I mean to teach, and ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... three faced each other in that flaming room, then with a sound of impotent fury, Kerissen turned and darted out the door. But as Billy turned to follow, his hand on Arlee's, there was a ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... wrote him characts and incensed him with Nadd and aloes-wood and ambergris three days' space; but his malady persisted three months, till King Asim was wroth with the leaches and said to them, "Woe to you, O dogs! What? Are all of you impotent to cure my son? Except ye heal him forthright, I will put the whole of you to death." The Archiater replied, "O King of the Age, in very sooth we know that this is thy son and thou wottest that we fail not of diligence in ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... infallibly gets into high society, she has the triumph of refusing many matches and securing the best, and she wears some family jewels or other as a sort of crown of righteousness at the end. Rakish men either bite their lips in impotent confusion at her repartees, or are touched to penitence by her reproofs, which, on appropriate occasions, rise to a lofty strain of rhetoric; indeed, there is a general propensity in her to make speeches, ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... the swells, the automobiles come, like gigantic bugs coming after the wicked. With a sucking rush of wind and dust and an odour of gasoline they are past. Stray pieces of paper at the roadside arise and fly after them, then, further on, sink impotent, exhausted. ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... family papers) this scandalous litigation had to be ended by a compromise lest worse should befall. It was settled finally by a surrender, out of the disputed estate, in full satisfaction of all claims, of two villages with the names of which I do not intend to trouble my readers. After this lame and impotent conclusion neither the wife nor the stepsons had anything to say to the man who had presented the world with such a successful example of self-help based on character, determination, and industry; and my great-grandmother, her ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... reason to feel secure than Carbo, who had so lately tested the suffrages of the people as electors and as judges; yet no man was in greater peril. It seems that, while exposed on the side of his former associates to the impotent rage which is excited by the success of the convert, who is believed to have been rewarded for his treachery, he had not won the confidence, or at least could not arouse the whole-hearted support, of his new associates and their following in the assembly. Perhaps the ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... always—and there is an extra-distinctness in your images and thoughts, from the midst of which, crossing each other infinitely, the general significance seems to escape. So that to talk of a 'mist,' when you are obscurest, is an impotent thing to do. Indeed ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... swear:—when bleeding Greece again Shall call Achilles, she shall call in vain. When, flush'd with slaughter, Hector comes to spread The purpled shore with mountains of the dead, Then shall thou mourn the affront thy madness gave, Forced to deplore when impotent to save: Then rage in bitterness of soul to know This act has made the bravest ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... and Peter's impotent ragings were repeated; then once more they brought bread and water, and Peter wondered, was it twice a day they brought it, or was this a new day? And how long did they mean to keep him here? Did they mean to drive him mad? He asked these questions of the man who ...
— 100%: The Story of a Patriot • Upton Sinclair
... failed—you have tried honourably and failed. Isn't the sting of impotent failure enough to meet without striving against a hopeless love?" He approached her and said softly: "I love you Shirley—don't drive me to desperation. Must I be punished because you have failed? It's unfair. The sins of ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... and breathless, wrapped in her rusty black shawl, with her shadow flitting far out over the level bog amid the slanted beams, she looked a not inappropriate messenger of woe, symbolically impotent and insignificant; a little dark speck in the wide westering light; a feeble stir of life creeping on the verge of a vast silent solitude; and full, withal, of baseless fears and futile plots, concerning the withered shred of existence that remained to her. She was just ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... the power," responded Demetrius; "but the Florentine authorities must be completely impotent in respect to such a formidable horde of lawless men. The remainder of my narrative is soon told, my lord," returned the young Greek. "I returned to my lodgings in safety, but determined not to remain there a single hour longer than necessary. For ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... regeneration is a creative act on the part of God, not a reforming process on the part of man. It is not brought about by natural descent, for all we get from that is "flesh." It is not by natural choice, for the human will is impotent. Nor is it by self-effort, or any human generative principle. Nor is it by the blood of any ceremonial sacrifices. It is not by pedigree or natural generation. It is altogether and absolutely the work of God. Practically ...
— The Great Doctrines of the Bible • Rev. William Evans
... the rector became more involved, more hesitating, more impotent. The sweat ran down his face. Even his fine voice was affected. It grew husky. It seemed to be failing. Yet he would not cease. To Malling he gave the impression of a man governed by a secret obstinacy, fighting on though he knew it was no use, that he had lost the combat. ...
— The Dweller on the Threshold • Robert Smythe Hichens
... 1801 he snatched from the rude hand of usurpation the violated Constitution of his country, and that is his crime. He preserved that instrument, in form, and substance, and spirit, a precious inheritance for generations to come, and for this he can never be forgiven. How vain and impotent is party rage, directed against such a man. He is not more elevated by his lofty residence, upon the summit of his own favorite mountain, than he is lifted, by the serenity of his mind, and the consciousness of a well-spent life, above the malignant passions and bitter feelings ...
— American Eloquence, Volume I. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... new joy, against which she was powerless to fight, was filling her life. It was absurd, impossible, not to be thought of, and yet all the time his insistence delighted her. He had so much the air of one who has always his own way. She felt her powers of resistance becoming almost impotent, and she watched their dissipation with secret joy. How was it possible to resist a lover so confident, so authoritative, especially when her whole heart was filled with a passionate longing to throw ...
— The Governors • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... which, with wings unclipt, children fasten to a stake. The birds seek to fly, and are pulled back before their wings are well spread; till, at last, they either perpetually strain at the end of their short tether, exciting only ridicule by their anguish and their impotent impatience; or, sullen and despondent, they remain on the ground, without any attempt to fly, nor creep, even to the full limit which their fetters will allow. Thus it is with the feelings of the keen, wild nature I speak ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... is published by the Secretary of the American Iron-Association, and by authority of the same. This Association—now four years old—is not a common trades-union, nor any impotent combination to resist the law of supply and demand. Its general objects, as stated in the constitution, are "to procure regularly the statistics of the trade, both at home and abroad; to provide for the mutual interchange of information and experience, both scientific and practical; to collect and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... to settle. For two years a great part of the island had been in open and determined revolt against Spanish rule. Though the forces of the King had been able to hold the seaports, thus cutting off the insurgents from regular communication with the outer world and making impotent their efforts to secure recognition from foreign powers, the patriots under Maceo and Gomez held control of the interior, established a government of their own, enforced order, and levied taxes. Enormous sacrifices were made by the Spanish people to re-establish ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... has to serve a Lady in your Circumstances; and I have that compassion for your Suffering that I would gladly lend my helping hand to bring so good a work as that about, that you might reap that Satisfaction which your Youth and Beauty calls for, and which your Husband is too impotent to give you. ...
— The London-Bawd: With Her Character and Life - Discovering the Various and Subtle Intrigues of Lewd Women • Anonymous
... no match. The small boy was at the mercy of the big one. The latter was indeed taken aback for a moment at the fury of his young assailant, impotent as it was, but that was all. He might have defended himself with a single hand; he might have carried the boy under one arm out into the passage. But the evil spirit had been roused within him, and that spirit knew no mercy. He struck out and fought his little foeman as if he had been one of his ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... was cursing yet, and smiting his broad chest, and gnashing his teeth in impotent malignity, suddenly a quick step became audible at a distance. The sound fell on his ear sharpened by the stimulus of fiery passions and of conscious fear, long ere it could have been perceived ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... man he hated, tearing its way through the stiff collar, felt the demoniacal strength shooting down his arm, the fever at his finger tips. He saw the terrified face of his victim, a strong man but impotent in his grasp; heard the splash of the turgid waters; saw himself, his lust for vengeance unsatisfied, peering downwards through the dim and murky gloom. It was not only a physical nightmare which seized him. His brain, too, ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... been a terrible blow to Harold; when he had first realised the permanent nature of his injuries, he had cursed his fate; his impotent rage had been pitiful to behold. This travail occurred in the first year of his affliction; later, he discovered, as so many others have done in a like extremity, that time accustoms the mind to anything: he was now resigned to his misfortune. His sufferings had endowed ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... on the one side, and poverty and ignorance on the other. After an honourable career of eight hundred years the monastery was overthrown. Even this great abbey, with its wealth and power and integrity, was impotent to withstand the popular prejudice aroused by the exposure of the degradation and vice prevailing in so many kindred institutions, the greed of Henry VIII., and the ruthless energy of Thomas Cromwell. In a few years it was swept away, leaving only a few beautiful fragments ...
— Evesham • Edmund H. New
... with cold and cautious steps (giving 4s. a month, sometimes, to fathers and mothers of families) through the Southern and middle regions of Scotland, becomes in the Highlands nearly petrified: at "the utmost" is only able to divide amongst "the impotent poor about 3s. 6d. a-head for the whole year." I dare say many things may be urged against this, as against all other evidence—a bit picked off here, another pruned off there—this statement modified, ...
— The Claims of Labour - an essay on the duties of the employers to the employed • Arthur Helps
... manoeuvres are practiced to-day. You must shatter the weapon in your enemies' hands, which they use against you."—Durand-Maillane, 154. "The simple execution of constitutional laws," said Bazire, "made for peaceable times, would be impotent among the conspiracies that surround ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... familiar haunts of his boyish days, it seemed as if he could perceive the figure of his grandmother sitting by the roadside and throwing stones at the procession as it went by. He could almost fancy the old woman aiming, in her impotent wrath, at that baneful influence which had trampled down her life, and with it, all she had gathered round her to make ...
— Captain Mansana and Mother's Hands • Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson
... the impotent ravings of the heroic tragedies we may measure the progress which the mind of Dryden had made. He had learned to avoid a too audacious competition with higher natures, to keep at a distance from the verge of bombast or nonsense, to venture on no expression which did not convey ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... professing a general regard for religion, and avowedly possessed of consciences exquisitely tender, and of charity unbounded, should, notwithstanding, object to the conscientious and charitable efforts in the cause of religion of which we have just been speaking! However, these impotent struggles have signally failed, and now there are clergy both of the English and Roman Church in Norfolk Island, while the moral condition of the prisoners there is stated to have improved greatly. In 1837 the Rev. Mr. Sharpe was removed thither, at his own request, from Pitt Town in New South ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... notion of civic purity, of honesty of administration make against this big manifestation of human friendliness, this stalking survival of village kindness? The notions of the civic reformer are negative and impotent before it. Such an alderman will keep a standing account with an undertaker, and telephone every week, and sometimes more than once, the kind of funeral he wishes provided for a bereaved constituent, ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... did not come from Peggy's lips. Like a flash, the girl had sprung forward, and caught the snake's neck under her crotched stick, just as he was raising himself to strike. Pinned firmly to the earth, the creature could only twist and wriggle in impotent rage. Looking around coolly, Peggy saw Lobelia's face peering around the trunk of a tree, ...
— Peggy • Laura E. Richards
... with the lights still gleaming as if to mock the celebration of victory, the crowds swayed in impotent rage through the streets, while the telegraph bore on the wings of lightning the awe-inspiring news. Men caught it from the wires, and stood in silent groups weeping, and their wrath against the fallen South began to rise as the moaning of the sea ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... an ass," he admitted bitterly, as he glanced in impotent contempt at the handful of weather-stained buildings which on the map bore the name of a town; "an ass, an ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... indehiscent nature of the latter. Again, the pollen-tube of the abnormal grains cracked, in its turn, on mere exposure to the air, and liberated the fovilla, so that the pollen of these atrophied anthers was necessarily impotent, because it opened before it could be applied to the stigma, even had that been rendered possible by ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... hope to divide us, to make of us a Russia, torn by Maximalists and Minimalists, by Militarists and Bolsheviki and, consequently, impotent for war. ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... peopled empire of China has scarcely begun. As yet it is but a small stream, but it will by-and-by pour over all the tropical countries of the East in one mighty torrent, completely destroying all such minor obstacles as jealous interference and impotent ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... they'll go to the wharves...stealing quietly through the darkness. Then there'll be the muffled dip of oars...and then——Oh, would that I could aid them in this hour! But I am impotent, impotent! ...
— Patriotic Plays and Pageants for Young People • Constance D'Arcy Mackay
... when steel doors clang behind them. Free spirits are as free behind the bars as they are under the open sky. The jail, as a gag, is impotent. While it may master the body, it cannot ...
— Bars and Shadows • Ralph Chaplin
... attainment by those that are wanting in Exertion. The Brahmana attains to prosperity by holy living, the Kshatriya by prowess, the Vaisya by manly exertion, and the Sudra by service. Riches and other objects of enjoyment do not follow the stingy, nor the impotent, nor the idler. Nor are these ever attained by the man that is not active or manly or devoted to the exercise of religious austerities. Even he, the adorable Vishnu, who created the three worlds with the Daityas and all the gods, even ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... man into a book as you put a sponge into a bucket. You take him out and squeeze him, and he returns the stream uncoloured. He is a sort of Half Hours with the Best Authors, bound in man's skin; he is intellectually impotent, he ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... received Bernadotte's letter on the occupation of Swedish Pomerania. When Bonaparte read it I was informed that he flew into a violent rage, and even exclaimed, "You shall submit to your degradation, or die sword in hand!" But his rage was impotent. The unexpected occupation of Swedish Pomerania obliged the King of Sweden to come to a decided rupture with France, and to seek other allies, for Sweden was not strong enough in herself to maintain neutrality in the midst of the general conflagration ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... Who weighs the wind and water with a weight, To Whom the world is neither small nor great, Whose knowledge foreknew every plan we planned. Searching my heart for all that touches you, I find there only love and love's goodwill Helpless to help and impotent to do, Of understanding dull, of sight most dim; And therefore I commend you back to Him Whose love your ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... reparation she had obtained in her enemy's absence, and clearly foreseeing that against the Duke of Burgundy, flushed with victory and present in person, she would obtain nothing of what she had asked. For spirits of the best mettle, and especially for a woman's heart, impotent passion is a heavy burden to bear; and Valentine Visconti, beautiful, amiable, and unhappy even in her best days through the fault of the husband she loved, sank under this trial. At the close of ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume III. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... had made no comment in his presence, it was a different matter after his departure. Loud indignation broke out, and fierce, if impotent, protest passed from lip to lip. It was only for a few moments, however, and presently anger gave place to a realization of the absurdity ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... leaped on the rear platform and began to speak, the Slav conductor regarding him stupidly, pulling the bellcord the while. Three or four policemen fought their way to the spot, striving to clear the tracks, bewildered and impotent in the face of the alien horde momentarily growing more ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... June the President sent to Congress what is usually denominated a war message; yet it contained no positive recommendation of war. "Congress must decide," said the President, "whether the United States shall continue passive" or oppose force to force. Prefaced to this impotent conclusion was a long recital of "progressive usurpations" and "accumulating wrongs"—a recital which had become so familiar in state papers as almost to lose its power to provoke popular resentment. It was significant, however, ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... with impotent rage. This range-rider always had interfered with his affairs from the first moment he had met him. If ever he got the chance again to stamp him out—! The strong fingers of the man worked with the nervous longing ...
— Steve Yeager • William MacLeod Raine
... had been yesterday, need he—together with this sting of passion—have felt also this impotent and angry despair? Before his eyes had seen that figure lying on the straw of Mrs. Ginnell's outhouse, could he ever have dreamed it possible that Elizabeth Merton ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... capable and intelligent chiefs of departments, and where I saw a body of artificers quite out of the common, but all of them misplaced in a badly situated establishment, the original plan of which was utterly defective, and in which they were forced to vegetate uselessly in spite of their own impotent efforts and endeavours. Thence we took our way across the Morbihan to Vannes, which during the whole of my father's reign was administered by the same prefect, and that with the esteem of every party. An exceptional case this (especially when the state of latent civil ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... Accordingly the impotent, insolent Donothingism in Practice and Saynothingism in Speech, which we have to witness on that side of our affairs, is altogether amazing. A Corn-Law demonstrating itself openly, for ten years or more, with 'arguments' to make the angels, and some other classes of creatures, weep! For ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... waited for the moment, too surely to come at last, when it should be openly recognized. In such circumstances the Mamiani ministry rapidly lost ground. Now in its death agony, and impotent for good, it persisted, with a degree of perverseness which nothing could moderate, in reiterating its declarations of war against Austria. This only added to the confusion which prevailed. The ministers and their more ardent adherents were ready, as became patriots and heroes, to fight for ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... very brilliant circle. The whole court of Charles Dix can afford none more amusing. For the rest, what matters? One learns to take things as they seem, without peering below the surface. One wearies of impotent Quixotism against unconquerable evils." ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... 1915, this time with decisive results. Should such a nation possess a monopoly in the means of rapid production, the world is practically at her mercy. Should she be prepared to break her word, the usual means of controlling disarmament are impotent against ...
— by Victor LeFebure • J. Walker McSpadden
... 'Neutral' sits becomingly On lips of weaklings. But the men whose brains Find fuel in their blood, the men whose minds Hold sympathetic converse with their hearts, Such men are never neutral. That word stands Unsexed and impotent in Realms of Speech. When mighty problems face a startled world No virile man is neutral. Right or wrong His thoughts go forth, assertive, unafraid To stand by his convictions, and to do Their part in shaping issues to an end. Silence may guard the door of useless words, At dictate of Discretion; ...
— Poems of Optimism • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... the Parliament beganne and holden at Westminster, the 8th daie of Maye, in the 14th yeare of the raigne of the Queen's Majesty that nowe is, one Acte was made intytuled, 'An Acte for the punishment of Vacabonds and for releife of the Pooere and Impotent'; and whereas at a Session of the Parliament, holden by prorogacon at Westminster, the eight daie of February, in the 28th yeare of Her Majesties raigne, an other Acte was made and intytuled, 'An Act for settinge of the Poore to work and for the avoydinge of idleness'; ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... in white; great lilies in vases, wreaths of stephanotis; and, above all, roses—great garlands of white roses had been woven, and they hung along and across. A blossom fell, a sob sounded in the stillness; and how trivial it all seemed, and how impotent to assuage the bitter burning of human sorrow: how paltry and circumscribed the old grey church, with its little graveyard full of forgotten griefs and aspirations! This hour of beautiful sorrow and roses, how long will ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... uttering wild screams, flapping her wings against his very beak, and endeavouring to distract his attention from the chase. It was to no purpose, however, as the eagle full well knew her object, and disregarding her impotent attempts, kept on in steady flight after her mate. This continued until the birds had reached a high elevation, and the ospreys, from their less bulk, were nearly out of sight. But the voyageurs could see that the eagle was on the point of overtaking ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... an occasion of offence. But finding no just grounds for their unbounded fury, they attacked him upon the score of religion; which was their common way of terrifying those they did not wish well to. Thus, whilst they indulged their impotent malice, they made him, who was not well affected to them before, a greater enemy to their licentiousness, and rendered him more inclinable to the Lutheran cause. In the mean time, the king, with Magdalen his wife, came from France, not without the resentment of the priesthood; who were afraid that ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... be no exhausting effort or hopeless sighing, 'Who shall ascend into heaven, that is, to bring Christ down from above?' It is a life that is meant for the sinful and the weary, for the unworthy and the impotent. It is a life that is the gift of the Father's love, and that He Himself will reveal in each one who comes in childlike trust to Him. It is a life that is meant for our every-day life, that in every ...
— Holy in Christ - Thoughts on the Calling of God's Children to be Holy as He is Holy • Andrew Murray
... I asked for reasons. They had none, and yet a thousand to give me. When I think of the miserable stories that were raked up against him,—the misconstruction of everything he did, or said, or left undone,—my own impotent indignation, and my poor brother's senseless rage, and the insulting way in which I was watched, and taunted, and tortured,—oh, Nelly! it is agony to write. I did the only thing left to me—I gave him up, and prayed for ...
— Miscellanea • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... * * Today I am full of grief to feel myself impotent before the murderous conflicts now going on in Belgium and at a number of points on our northern and eastern frontiers, while awaiting the great battles and hecatombs which will follow; my thought is full of these terrible calamities willfully brought about; so many precious ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... was an insignificant little hausfrau); but when she was in her room after midnight she realized grimly that if she had not done her work so well during that terrible month in New York and buried her sex heart, she should once more be beating the floor or the wall with her impotent hands. But the knowledge of her immunity ...
— The White Morning • Gertrude Atherton
... shrinking, for she checked herself, and, slowly turning her lifeless screen, hid behind it. It was impotent deprecation translated into flesh,—at once ludicrous and painful. The young man found so much difficulty in restraining the manifestation of his distaste, that he blushed in the twilight at his own rudeness. He would do his ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... rate, some persons seem to have opened more eyes than others, they see with such force and distinctness; their vision penetrates the tangle and obscurity where that of others fails like a spent or impotent bullet. How many eyes did Gilbert White open? how many did Henry Thoreau? how many did Audubon? how many does the hunter, matching his sight against the keen and alert sense of a deer or a moose, or fox or a wolf? Not outward eyes, ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... the plantation road, but Zora could not speak. She pushed them slowly on, and turned aside to let the anger, the impotent, futile anger, rage itself out. Alone in the great broad spaces, she knew she could fight it down, and come back again, cool and in calm and deadly earnest, to lead these ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... bubbles burst in havoc and ruin she smiled and counted her gains, turning a deaf ear to the storm of execration that raged against her outside the palace walls. She knew that she had played her cards so skilfully that all the popular rage was impotent to harm her. Only one of her many puppets—Knight, the Treasurer of the South Sea Company—could be the means of doing her harm. If he were arrested and told all he knew, impeachment would probably follow, with a sentence of imprisonment ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... frequently fail than succeed in their direct object, and as the alternative of considering them impotent is not open to the votary, some other explanation of their failure was taught in very early day. At first, it was that the god was angered, and refused the petition out of revenge. Later, the indirect purpose of such ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... an earnest study of English ecclesiastical ornament, reduced his art to something a little lower than English alabasters? The danger is there always; and unless our able young men make a grand struggle, they too will find themselves sucked into the backwater, impotent, insignificant, ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... pages of the book which Amzi had given him. It was a late study of the art of Henry Irving, and its bestowal had been a conscious flattery on Amzi's part. Still, it touched unhappy chords in Hastings's bosom. Who was better equipped than he to catch up the fallen mantle of Irving? And here he lay impotent in the hands of the fates that had set him down in a dull village, without means even to hang a moving-picture screen upon the deserted ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... would have delighted the most martinet of inspectors at Okehampton. Bang came another, and another, and another, right into the heart of the battery. The six little guns lay back at their extremest angle, and all barked together in impotent fury. Another shell pitched over them, and the officer in command lowered his field-glass in despair as he saw his own shells bursting far short upon the hillside. Jameson's defeat does not seem to have been due to any defect in his artillery. French, peering and pondering, ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... in the Kingdom; and his Malice is greatest where Worth and Virtue are most conspicuous; this of Course must engage him to vent a very large Portion of his Rage against the Family and Person of the greatest Man this Nation ever produced. But how vain is the Attempt here? How impotent, as well as base the Malice? There is no immediate Fence indeed against an infamous Tongue, and must often be for some Time submitted to; but in this Case 'tis otherwise; what the Doctor asserts of this Person and his Family is so universally known to be false, and condemned ...
— A Letter From a Clergyman to his Friend, - with an Account of the Travels of Captain Lemuel Gulliver • Anonymous
... over. The Maid received the blessing of the Abbe, who, if not convinced of the sacredness of her mission, was yet impotent to prove aught against her. It is strange to me, looking back at those days, how far less ready of heart the ecclesiastics were to receive her testimony and recognise in her the messenger of the Most High than were the soldiers, whether the generals whom she afterwards came to ...
— A Heroine of France • Evelyn Everett-Green
... measures, that of local responsibility for local distress, and that of a distinction between the pauper and the vagabond, were more clearly defined in a statute of 1572. By this Act the justices in the country districts, and mayors and other officers in towns, were directed to register the impotent poor, to settle them in fitting habitations and to assess all inhabitants for their support. Overseers were appointed to enforce and superintend their labour, for which wool, hemp, flax, or other stuff was to be provided ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... leave me, I must be alone. Another time I may be able to converse, but now"—she broke off abruptly, wringing her hands in impotent despair, while the great tears fell over them, like the last heavy drops of a spent shower. "Leave me, Ralph, leave me!" she exclaimed, with a ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... "Matter?" A sharp, impotent oath broke from him. Then he checked his impulse to rave. "Yes. See here, Nita," he went on, with a restraint which added deep impressiveness, "we've got to quit. We've got to get out—quick. Steve's hard on our trail. I've seen him ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... forward. The sensation of absolute physical fear by which he was oppressed was a revelation to him. He found himself wishing almost feverishly that he was armed. The physical strength in which he had trusted seemed to him at that instant a valueless and impotent thing. There was a splash of spray or raindrops against the window and through the crack in the door. The lamp chimney hissed and spluttered and finally the light went out. The room was in sudden darkness. Hamel sprang then to his feet. Silence had become an intolerable thing. He felt ...
— The Vanished Messenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... more brilliant than I had ever seen it, in the light of the lamp that stood on the table by us; and the duke looked at it as a magician might at the amulet which had failed him, or a warrior at the talisman that had proved impotent. And I, moved to a sudden anger with him for tempting the girl with such a bribe, said bitterly and scornfully, with ...
— The Indiscretion of the Duchess • Anthony Hope
... human passions and designs, the promptings of instinct and nature; but to the eye of the poet how sublime and august! These tiny creatures could be dominated by emotions—love, honour, patriotism, liberty—which could enable them, frail and impotent as they were, to rise majestically above the darkest and saddest limitations of immortality. They could be racked with pain, crushed, tormented, silenced; but nothing could make them submit, nothing could ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... self-love forever? But he has a wife and family. You respect their feelings, smile and smile, and are villain enough to be civil with your lips, and hide the poison of asps under your tongue, till you have a chance to relieve your o'ercharged heart by shaking your fist in impotent wrath at his retreating form. You will receive the reward of your hypocrisy, as you richly deserve, for ten to one he will drop in again when he comes back from his office, and arrest you wandering in Dreamland in the beautiful twilight. Delighted ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... flitted desperately around the room, along the shelves laden with those countless figures—all white and finely slender, all upturned of face. Again a little impotent gasp choked her; then, eyes filling hotly at that poignantly wistful smile which edged the lips of each, she stooped and patted reassuringly the trembling hands before she stepped a pace away ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... that they might live in peace with a lover. I have seen women teaching the child of their marriage such tastes as must bring it to the grave in order to benefit the child of an illicit affection. I could not tell you all I have seen, for I have seen crimes against which justice is impotent. In short, all the horrors that romancers suppose they have invented are still below the truth. You will know something of these pretty things; as for me, I am going to live in the country with my wife. I have a ...
— Colonel Chabert • Honore de Balzac
... the world's progress may not go. With thrift, and wealth, and comfort, I daily race neck and neck. Be kind to me if you want me to be useful to you. And near be the day when the red horse of war shall be hocked and impotent, and the pale horse of death shall be hurled back on his haunches, but the white horse of peace, and joy, and triumph shall pass on, its rider with face like the sun, ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... Theodore's face became distorted and dreadful with pain. He raised two impotent, shaking arms high above his head. "That's just it! That's just it! You don't know what love is. You don't know what hate is. You don't know how I hate myself. Loathe myself. She's all that's miserable, all ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... the possibility that democracy may govern badly and oppressively; Maine has warned us that the dominance of the commonalty may end in the triumph of the mediocre, and a more than Chinese stagnation; Carlyle has denounced democracy as powerful for destruction, but impotent for building up, as helpless in the face of great emergencies, as incapable of choosing good leaders; Lecky has demonstrated the danger of the corruption of the democracy by evil politicians; Belloc has shown how it tends to develop, and then ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... The next moment, as she stooped to look at the nearest of the two traps, another slim yellow creature, larger than the first, leaped up, with a vicious cry, and almost reached her face. But, fortunately for her, it was held fast by both hind legs in the trap, and fell back impotent. ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... that the unfortunate might perish, reflecting that "The live man hath no murtherer."[FN99] Secondly, he did so with the design that, as Alaeddin could not come forth from underground, he would also be impotent to bring out the Lamp from the souterrain. So presently he wended his ways and retired to his own land, Africa, a sadder man and disappointed of all his expectations. Such was the case with the Wizard; but as regards Alaeddin when the earth was heaped over him, he began shouting to the ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... VENGEANCE! He employed lawyers and spent considerable money in the expectation not only of setting the divorce aside, but in bringing the lady and her paramour to condign punishment. His efforts, however, proved perfectly impotent. The lawyer, resident at the court, remembered nothing of the evidence, and the court remembered the case only so far as that it ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... day were sicklied by cold night, When sentries froze and muttered; when beyond the wire Blank shadows crawled and tumbled, shaking, tricking the sight, When impotent hatred of Life stifled desire, Then soared the sudden rocket, broke in blanching showers. O lagging watch! O dawn! ...
— Country Sentiment • Robert Graves
... I retrace the impression left upon me by that walk under the waters? Words are impotent to relate such wonders. Captain Nemo walked in front, his companion followed some steps behind. Conseil and I remained near each other, as if an exchange of words had been possible through our metallic cases. I no longer felt the weight of my clothing, ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... ambition had combined to rear. A brilliant alliance that insured great wealth, that promised a secure stepping-stone to political preferment, was apparently a substantial bulwark against the swelling billows of an unaccountable whim; yet he was impotent to resist the yearning tenderness which impelled him to forget all else, in one determined effort to rescue and shelter the life he had been the chief agent in imperilling. Clear eyed, keen witted, he did not for an instant deceive himself; and he knew that neither compassion for ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... leant forward in his chair, and placed his hand upon his friend's arm. The effect was magical. His fit of impotent rage died down as suddenly as it had sprung up, and immediately he became again the quiet, suave, smoothspoken individual who had first entered ...
— My Strangest Case • Guy Boothby
... gambling houses. During the carnival season of 1777 the gambling which went on in the royal apartments became notorious for even that profligate time: in one night the Duc de Chartres lost eight thousand livres. Louis XVI, honest man, took all due precautions to reduce this extravagance, but was impotent. ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... overpowered by half a dozen men, and re-bound. Then two men sat down beside him, each with a small stick, with which they beat the muscles of his arms and legs, until their power was completely taken away. This done, they left him, a living heap of impotent flesh in the bottom of the boat, and a salutary warning to ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne
... 1410; that is to say, exactly two years before Joan of Arc was born in Domremy. My family had fled to those distant regions from the neighborhood of Paris in the first years of the century. In politics they were Armagnacs—patriots; they were for our own French King, crazy and impotent as he was. The Burgundian party, who were for the English, had stripped them, and done it well. They took everything but my father's small nobility, and when he reached Neufchateau he reached it in poverty and with a broken spirit. But the political atmosphere there was ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... matter of course. Naturally! He still kept a hold on common sense. He would not only refrain, but be civil. If Claude were in need of anything or were short of cash he would probably write him a check. It was the irony of this kind of rage that it was so impotent. It was impotent and absurd. It might shake him to the foundations of his being, but it would come to nothing in the end. It both relieved and embittered him to ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... money. I reached Bologna a few minutes after Catinella, and put up at the same hotel, where I found an opportunity of telling her all her lover had said. I arrived in Reggio before her, but I could not speak to her in that city, for she was always in the company of her potent and impotent lord. After the fair, during which nothing of importance occurred to me, I left Reggio with my friend Baletti and we proceeded to Turin, which I wanted to see, for the first time I had gone to that city with Henriette I had ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... and omnipotent, materia [25] medica, hygiene, and animal magnetism are impotent; and their only supposed efficacy is in apparently delud- ing reason, denying revelation, and dethroning Deity. The tendency of mental healing is to uplift mankind; but this method perverted, is "Satan let loose." Hence the [30] deep demand for ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... that they cannot produce, it is a source of unspeakable regret to them both. In such cases, the inherent desire for parenthood will "cry aloud and spare not." A "barren" woman greatly mourns her inability, and will shed bitter tears over the fact, if she be truly human; and an "impotent" man will be practically despised by all who are aware ...
— Sane Sex Life and Sane Sex Living • H.W. Long
... who bore the name of Ottoboni, had only married her to obtain an heir, but the poor devil turned out to be what the Romans call 'babilano', and we impotent. The duchess told me as much on the occasion of my third visit. She did not give me the information in a complaining tone, or as if she was fain to be consoled, but merely to defy her confessor, who had threatened her with excommunication if she went on telling people about her ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... was, that she had taken impotent rage for strength of purpose. Mr. Nash was aware that he had neglected his daughter, and was anxious to stifle the thought by laying the blame on every one else. And Bertie was quicker than Judith was in reading character when it was on his ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
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