"Shortcoming" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... situation redolent with comedy. He had a quick eye for such matters; so quick an eye that he deplored on the present occasion her ladyship's entire lack of a sense of humor. But for that lamentable shortcoming, she might have enjoyed with him the grotesqueness of her having—she, who disliked him so exceedingly—toiled and anguished, robbed herself of sleep, and hoped and prayed with more fervor, perhaps, than she had ever yet hoped and ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... for the best of us, much sense of failure and shortcoming when we look back on our lives. But whilst some of us will have to say, 'I have played the fool and erred exceedingly,' it is possible for each of us to lay himself down in peace and sleep, awaiting a glorious rising again ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... it unctuously, almost reconciled to his own shortcoming, because it was the first time, as far as he knew, that a Belwether might legitimately enjoy the pleasures of holding the word ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... time, she has shown more and more anxiety to win laurels as a dramatic singer. But here the vocal style which she has exclusively cultivated has proved an insuperable obstacle. Although free from the smaller vices of the Italian school, she could not overcome the great and fatal shortcoming of that school—the maltreatment of the poetic text. She could not find the proper accents required in operas where the words of the text are as important as the melody itself; and she has failed therefore to give satisfaction even in such works as "Faust" ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... interests of absent children than he and Phebe were in the welfare of Felix and Hilda. But they could never quite reconcile themselves to this marriage. They had quitted England with no intention of dwelling here again, but they felt that Phebe's shortcoming in her attachment to them made their old country less attractive to them. She had severed the last link that bound them to it. Possibly, in the course of years, they might visit their old home; but it would never seem the same to them. Canon Pascal alone rejoiced ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... day, I would recommend rather that the gentlemen be beguiled into doing the talking themselves, if any shortcoming in the menu is to be concealed from them, for then ...
— The Belgian Cookbook • various various
... influence, and the true seal of mastery, its authors assign to Pellegrino da San Daniele the Holy Family in the Louvre, in consideration of certain points where it comes short of this standard. Such shortcoming, however, will hardly diminish the spectator's enjoyment of a singular charm of liquid air, with which the whole picture seems instinct, filling the eyes and lips, the very garments, of its sacred personages, with some wind- searched ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... seems positively to have but one defect, a defect which from one point of view is certainly a quality, the defect of impeccability. It is at any rate impeccable; to seek in it a blemish, or, within its own limitations, a distinct shortcoming, is to lose one's pains. As workmanship, and workmanship of the subtler kind, in which every detail of surface and structure is perceived to have been intelligently felt (though rarely enthusiastically ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... with our puny knowledge. But even these great souls report that they do not possess the answer to the Final Question—the "Why" of the Infinite Manifestation. And so we may be excused from attempting to answer it—and without shame or sense of shortcoming do we still say, to this question, "We do ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... rounds went by; Alan picked up increasing skill at the game, but failed to win. He saw his shortcoming, but could not do anything to help it: he was unable to extrapolate ahead. Hawkes was gifted with the knack of being able to extend probable patterns two or three moves into the future; Alan could only work with the given, and so he never made ...
— Starman's Quest • Robert Silverberg
... desperate habit,—one that is rarely cured. Apology is only egotism wrong side out. Nine times out of ten, the first thing a man's companion knows of his shortcoming is from his apology. It is mighty presumptuous on your part to suppose your small failures of so much consequence that you must make ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... multitude it is not probable that Gissing will ever succeed in impressing himself. There is an absence of transcendental quality about his work, a failure in humour, a remoteness from actual life, a deficiency in awe and mystery, a shortcoming in emotional power, finally, a lack of the dramatic faculty, not indeed indispensable to a novelist, but almost indispensable as an ingredient in great novels of this particular genre.[1] In temperament and vitality he is palpably inferior to the masters ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... that I am using terms unjustifiable in violence. They would, indeed, be unjustifiable, if, spoken from this chair, they were violent at all. They are, unhappily, temperate and accurate,—except in shortcoming of blame. For we are not only impotent to restore, but strong to defile, the work of past ages. Of the impotence, take but this one, utterly humiliatory, and, in the full meaning of it, ghastly, example. We have lately been busy embanking, in the capital of the ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... will have the appearance almost equal to an opal. To make sure of the picture adhering to the glass, however, and at the same time to give greater brilliancy, it is better to flow the glass with a 10 or 15 grain solution of clear gelatine before squeezing it down. The one fault or shortcoming of the plain argentic paper is the dullness of the surface when dry, and this certainly makes it unsuitable for small work, such as the rapid production of cartes or proofs from negatives wanted in a hurry; the tone of an argentic print is also spoken of sometimes as being objectionable; ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 415, December 15, 1883 • Various
... and thrust out his hand. "Hello!" he said. I thought his "Hello!" might be French quite as easily as American, so I merely returned his handshake. He grinned, and then said in perfectly good "American": "You forget me, huh?" I admitted my shortcoming in memory; but his beard was very thick and stubby and his uniform was very dirty. I complimented his linguistic ability. He waved his arms, saying: "Huh, didn't I live eight years in little old New ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... said "that, to combine the ceremonial shortcoming of the eunuch with the imperfect faith of the Samaritan, is to arrive at the admission of the Gentiles[56]." Preparation had been made in both these instances for the carrying out of the Divine scheme by means of St. Philip, whose fellow-Deacon had gladly laid down ...
— A Key to the Knowledge of Church History (Ancient) • John Henry Blunt
... part),—putting ourselves in this mental attitude, the performance may safely be said to defy criticism, or rather to be above it, except such criticism as accords with enthusiastic admiration. It is absolutely without a shortcoming, seen from this standpoint. His majestic bearing, his beautiful elocution, his pure voice, his graceful, expressive gestures, and above all his perfect freedom from affectation or self-consciousness, delight us throughout; and when to these ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... cribbage game under the barber shop was suspended, and the cribbage game was an institution. It was the deacon's one shortcoming, but even there he strove to get the better of the enemy, for the two men who were considered his only worthy antagonists at the game were Congregationalists. The three bickered and quarreled and threatened each other with violence, but they played daily. There were few ...
— Scattergood Baines • Clarence Budington Kelland
... explanatory notes to the recipes are interesting, copious and well-authenticated. The editor reveals himself to be a better scholar, well-read in the classics, than a practical cook, well-versed in kitchen practice. Frequently, for instance, he confounds liquamen with garum, the age-old shortcoming of ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... the Earl's interest; "indeed," says Mr. Sidney Lee, "he did not retain the favour of any patron long." It is only fair to state, however, that the withdrawal of Lord Southampton's patronage may not have been due to any fault or shortcoming on the part of Nash, for there is likewise no evidence whatever to show that any close intimacy existed between Southampton and Shakspeare after 1594. Probably there was much else to claim Lord Southampton's attention—his marriage, ...
— The Choise of Valentines - Or the Merie Ballad of Nash His Dildo • Thomas Nash
... of quantity or degree.] Inequality. — N. inequality; disparity, imparity; odds; difference &c. 15; unevenness; inclination of the balance, partiality, bias, weight; shortcoming; casting weight, make- weight; superiority &c. 33; inferiority &c. 34; inequation[obs3]. V. be unequal &c. adj.; countervail; have the advantage, give the advantage; turn the scale; kick the beam; topple,topple over; overmatch &c. 33; not come up to &c. 34. Adj. unequal, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... of this conversion means many things. It means first and foremost an understanding of human nature; a realization that the great shortcoming of industry has been that it held, as organized, too little opportunity for a normal outlet to the normal and more or less pressing interests ...
— Working With the Working Woman • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... the Confederate ranks. "I think even our men," says a Federal officer, "had a kind of admiration for him, as he sat unmoved upon his horse, and let them pepper away at him as if he enjoyed it." His one shortcoming was his ignorance of drill and discipline. But in the spring of 1862 these deficiencies were in a fair way of being rectified. He had already learned something of tactics. In command of a few hundred mounted ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... eliminated the article On Vows, since it was too brief, and substituted a fuller explanation. Now I am also treating of the Power of the Keys. I would like to have you read the articles of faith. If you find no shortcoming in them, we shall manage to treat the remainder. For one must always make some changes in them and adapt oneself to conditions. Subinde enim mutandi sunt atque ad occasiones accommodandi." (C. R. 2, 60; Luther, 16, 689.) Improvements suggested by Regius and Brenz were also ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... feelings, the flashes of genius, the sallies of wit, the little touches of tenderness and romance, and so forth. Very likely; but the actual child does just the reverse of this. Is there a trivial weakness, a venial shortcoming, a microscopic spot of imperfection anywhere? The ruthless little imp has marked it for his own, and will infallibly reproduce it, certainly before your servants, and possibly ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... an hour ago, received your Concord Letter of the 19th of March. The Letter you speak of there as "written last Saturday" has not yet made its appearance, but may be looked for now shortly: as there is no mention here of any mischance, except the shortcoming of Printers' copy, I infer that all else is in a tolerably correct state; I wait patiently for the "last Saturday" tidings, and will answer as to the matters of copy, in good heart, without loss of ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... of shortcoming that I offer the reader this volume on a great subject, but should it succeed in stimulating interest in Breton story, and in directing students to a field in which their research is certain to be richly rewarded, I shall not regret the ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... badly dressed that even a man accustomed to shabbiness would have been ashamed to be seen in the street in such rags. In that quarter of the town, however, scarcely any shortcoming in dress would have created surprise. Owing to the proximity of the Hay Market, the number of establishments of bad character, the preponderance of the trading and working class population crowded in these ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... not stupid, as his master asserted; for indeed in other matters he was bright and clever, and his father had been well pleased with the progress he made with his studies; but, in the first place; he hated his work, and, in the second, every shortcoming and mistake was magnified and made the most of by the foreman, Andrew Carson. This man had long looked to be taken into partnership, and finally to succeed his master, seeing that the latter had no sons, and he conceived a violent jealousy of Jack Stilwell, in whose presence, as a prime ...
— The Bravest of the Brave - or, with Peterborough in Spain • G. A. Henty
... individual conduct. No disreputable persons had ever yet set up their unholy Lares and Penates in one of those new slack-baked villas; and that person must have been very bold who, conscious of moral unfitness or pecuniary shortcoming, should have ventured to pitch his ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... am tempted to believe that this"—he nodded towards the ghastly and sinister object upon the table—"was a servant of the Chinese Doctor. In other words, we see before us one whom Fu-Manchu has rebuked for some shortcoming." ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... grieve for my hasty judgment of Captain Blaise: and I did. But for the Governor's son, not a qualm. I, too, like Captain Blaise, had become the creature of hereditary instincts and overpowering emotion. Never in all my life before had I thought that any sin or shortcoming of mine was ever to be anybody's business but my own. My salvation lay in the future, which, now that my conscience was awakened, I would have only myself to censure if it did not ...
— Wide Courses • James Brendan Connolly
... father remembers nothing of it, and if there was a single human being who shed a tear in Barchester for that woman, I believe it was your father. And it was the same with mine. It came to that at last, that I could not bear to speak to him of any shortcoming as to one of his own clergymen. I might as well have pricked him with a penknife. And yet they say men become heartless and unfeeling as ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... princes, could not refrain from hoping even against hope that good might come from beyond the Alps. Yet when the foreigners appeared, he trembled at the violence they wrought upon the ancient liberties of Italy. Savonarola's chief shortcoming as a patriot consisted in this, that he strengthened the old folly of the Florentines in leaning upon strangers.[1] Had he taught the Italians to work out their self-regeneration from within, instead of preparing them to accept an alien's yoke, he ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... Commons into conflict with the freeholders of Westminster. Discontent became active and general. "Junius" began, in his letters, to attack boldly the King's friends, and into the midst of the discontent was thrown a message from the Crown asking for half a million, to make good a shortcoming in the Civil List. Men asked in vain what had been done with the lost money. Confusion at home was increased by the great conflict with the American colonies; discontents, ever present, were colonial as well as home. In such a time Burke ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... the wilderness carried in its rude completeness a hint of the prestidigitateur's art—a world of desolation, and behold a log cabin with smoke issuing from the chimney and curtains at the windows! The interior was unplastered, but this shortcoming was surmounted by tacking cheesecloth neatly over the logs, a device at once simple and strategic, as in the lamplight the effect was that of plaster. Miss Carmichael, suddenly released from the actual rumbling of the ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... privates in the confusion of the capture, turning with their own hands against the enemy a cannon that had just been taken. Barlow was as cool as when he fired off the old cannon in Cambridge ten years before. This stroke proved futile, but from no shortcoming of Barlow's. A few weeks later at Cold Harbor he effected a lodgment within the Confederate works when all others failed. That too proved futile, but his reputation was confirmed as one of the most brilliant of division ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... it the more strange), had previously happened to my father; and if they are good and do not die, something not at all unsimilar will be found in time to have befallen my successors of to-day. Of the specific points of change, of advantage in the past, of shortcoming in the present, I must own that, on a near examination, they look wondrous cloudy. The chief and far the most lamentable change is the absence of a certain lean, ugly, idle, unpopular student, whose presence was for me ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... our creation, we call to mind our lamentable and tragical fall from that blessed station we were constitute into. "All men have sinned and come short of the glory of God," Rom. iii. 23. His being in the world was for that glory, and he is come short of that glory. O strange shortcoming! Short of all that he was ordained for! What is he now meet for? For what purpose is that chief of the works of God now! The salt, if it lose its saltness, is meet for nothing, for wherewithal shall it be seasoned? Mark ix. 50. Even so, when man is rendered unfit for his ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... powers by arbitrary interference with the orderly course of human development ... a suppressed or perverted good quality—a good tendency, only repressed, misunderstood or misguided—lies at the bottom of every shortcoming." Hence the only remedy even for wickedness is to find and foster, build up and guide what has been repressed. It may be necessary to interfere and even to use severity, but only when the educator is sure of unhealthy growth. The motto of the biologist on the subject of interference—"When ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... wherein he was like Nero, who allowed no one to leave the theater while he was singing. But the former did it for the salvation and the latter for the corruption of souls. Fray Salvi rarely resorted to blows, but was accustomed to punish every shortcoming of his subordinates with fines. In this respect he was very different from Padre Damaso, who had been accustomed to settle everything with his fists or a cane, administering such chastisement with the greatest good-will. For this, however, he should not be judged too ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... refused to enter them. This was the germ of the later 'workhouse test.'[82] When grievances arose, the invariable plan, as Nicholls observes,[83] was to increase the power of the justices. Their discretion was regarded 'as a certain cure for every shortcoming of the law and every evil arising out of it.' The great report of 1834 traces this tendency[84] to a clause in an act passed in the reign of William III., which was intended to allow the justices to check the extravagance of parish officers. They were empowered to strike off persons ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... accounted for a certain faint glow of indignation that came into them. In truth, he began distinctly to resent this state of affairs in the life of John and Mary Richling. An ill-defined anger beat about in his brain in search of some tangible shortcoming of theirs upon which to thrust the blame of their helplessness. "Criminal helplessness," he called it, mutteringly. He tried to define the idea—or the idea tried to define itself—that they had somehow been recreant to their social caste, by getting down into the condition and estate ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... well that ends well, and only that is well, then this story fails at the finish, for we never caught the cannibals, so never taught them the lesson in housekeeping and economics that they needed. But there is no other shortcoming to record. ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... shortcoming of the English mind in judging of this book, its great alienation from the philosophy of Art is revealed. This book is not comprehended as a work of Art, claiming as such due proportions and relative significance ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... the way they put it now among themselves, Mabel's shortcoming. She had never done anything to deserve this misery. Lying on her couch in the square, solid house in Augustus Road, Wimbledon, Mabel covered her nullity with the imperial purple of her doom. In the family she was supreme by divine ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... her conviction that they were displeased: their displeasure, awful as she believed it to be, did not terrify her, but it vexed her to the inmost heart: she feared that they had not been rightly propitiated, and resolved that the shortcoming must ...
— The Forest of Vazon - A Guernsey Legend Of The Eighth Century • Anonymous
... obey my bidding." Asked the nurse, "Why, then, O my lord, didst thou conceal the secret of thy rank and lineage and passedst thyself off for a foreigner and a wayfarer? Alas for our disgrace before thee by reason of our shortcoming in rendering thee thy due! What shall be our excuse with thee, and thou of the sons of the kings?" But he rejoined, "By Allah, thou hast not fallen short! Indeed, 'tis incumbent on me to requite thee, what while ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... One shortcoming of such methods of arming an aeroplane will be observed. Ahead firing only is possible; the weapon cannot be trained astern, while similarly the line of fire on either broadside is severely limited. This is one reason why the machine-gun armament of aerial craft of the heavier-than-air ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot
... immensely, but, with many honorable exceptions, they have laid too much stress on their several specialties, making too wide a range of ailments fall within them. As for the community at large, their shortcoming lies in the fact that most of them would seek for a specialist in mumps in case that painful but transitory infliction were to come upon them, and in their underrating of the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... necessarily follow, that, because a man is a great painter, he is also a great artist. Yet we may safely infer, that, if he has been true in one department of the several which constitute art, he cannot have been false in others. Should there be a shortcoming, it must be that of a man whose mission does not include that wherein he fails. Fidelity to himself is all we should demand. We say this for those who are disposed to depreciate what an artist actually accomplishes, because in some one point ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... course it is only one. A very large number of causes are unquestionably at work to the same end, and the result can be adequately changed only if it is analyzed into as many of its component parts as possible, and each one of these dealt with separately. The writers have emphasized the shortcoming of women's colleges, because it is easily demonstrated and, they believe, relatively easily mitigated. But the record of men's colleges ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... existence of the Artisans' Committee, which not long ago considered the establishment of the Institute so sensibly, and supported it so heartily, I earnestly entreat the gentlemen—earnest I know in the good work, and who are now among us,—by all means to avoid the great shortcoming of similar institutions; and in asking the working man for his confidence, to set him the great example and give him theirs in return. You will judge for yourselves if I promise too much for the working man, ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... glance he gave my verses that I had better not lavish myself upon that kind of thing, unless there was a great deal more of me than I could have made apparent in our meeting, no doubt he was right. I was only too painfully aware of my shortcoming, but I felt that it was shorter-coming than it need have been. I had somehow not prospered in my visit to Emerson as I had with Hawthorne, and I came away wondering in what sort I had gone wrong. I was not ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... wretched as they, or even more so, being convinced of her own shortcoming in not having won the affection or confidence that would have made all open between them. She could not understand why Hubert Delrio should not have been made known ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... before he delivers a final pronouncement. Not until these native artists are able to regard their crude attempts from the other side of the canvas can they hope to become equally proficient. To this fatal shortcoming must be added that of insatiable ambition, which prompts the young to the portrayal of widely differing subjects. Into the picture-room of one who might thus be described this person was recently conducted, to pass an opinion ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... After supper she dressed herself carefully in her blue, beaded crepe—for vanity is harder to quell than pride and Irene always saw any flaw or shortcoming in another girl's appearance. Besides, as Rilla had told her mother one day when she was nine years old, "It is easier to behave nicely when you ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... namby-pamby, for my taste; and Sara is stupid. She laughs and talks, but she never says anything that people have not said a hundred times before. Oh, I am so tired of it all! I grow more cross and disagreeable every day,' finished Jill, who was very frank on the subject of her shortcoming. ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... Not to conceal his shortcoming it must be said that Freytag, at the time of the accession to the throne of the present head of the German Empire, laid himself open to much censure by attacking the memory of the dead Emperor Frederick who had always ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... not escape conviction, however, for Samuel Rowlands showed him up in Martin Mark-All. Yet another instance of wholesale "conveyance" is mentioned in the Note to "Canting Rhymes" (ante). In spite of this shortcoming, however, and a certain recklessness of workmanship, the scholar of to- day owes Dekker a world of thanks: his information concerning the social life of his time is such as can be obtained nowhere else, and it is, therefore, now of ...
— Musa Pedestris - Three Centuries of Canting Songs - and Slang Rhymes [1536 - 1896] • John S. Farmer
... Failure on such points would have so much surprised him that he would scarcely have known what steps to take. But Jervis, his butler, knew what was best as well as Mr. Tatham did, and was quite as little disposed to put up with any shortcoming. I say I am not sorry for him that he was not married—up to this time. But, as a matter of fact, the time does come when one becomes sorry for the well-to-do, highly respectable, refined, and agreeable man who ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... ideal was to be daring in speech and reckless in braving dangers, both moral and physical; and though her practice fell far behind her ideal, this shortcoming seemed to be due to the pettiness of circumstances, the narrow theatre which life offers to a girl of twenty, who cannot conceive herself as anything else than a lady, or as in any position which would lack the tribute of respect. She had no permanent consciousness of other fetters, or of more ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... shortcoming, deficiency, imperfection, foible, fault, infirmity, defect, errancy, fallibility, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... Government from which he differed at all,—from which he differed so vitally on the question of Church Establishment? Probably in nothing else had Cromwell wholly disappointed him. Through the Protectorate there had been all the toleration of religious differences that could be desired, or what shortcoming there had been had hardly been by Cromwell's own fault; the other interferences with liberty had hardly perhaps, in Milton's estimation, gone beyond the necessities of police; and in Cromwell's foreign policy, with its magnificent championship of Protestantism abroad, what man in England was ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... here; you will have one of these taxes to pay every stage to Uyofu, and then the heavy work will begin; for all these men, although they assume the dignity of chief to themselves, are mere officers, who have to pay tribute to Suwarora, and he would be angry if they were shortcoming." ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... nothing to do. Lola's father could easily repair Jane's shortcoming, but not without having an explanation of the facts of the case. The facts of the case he must never know. Even in her pain and indignation, Lola never ...
— A Prairie Infanta • Eva Wilder Brodhead
... the leadership crisis that developed in black units early in the war. The logic of segregated units demanded a black officer corps, but there were never enough black officers to command all the black units. In 1942 only 0.35 percent of the Negroes in the Army were officers, a shortcoming that could not be explained by poor education alone.[2-48] But when the number of black officers did begin to increase, obstacles to their employment appeared: some white commanders, assuming that Negroes did not possess leadership ability and that black troops ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... we measure in length, we can turn the golden reed upon ourselves for specialization in breadth, and often again we find a shortcoming. The breadth must also be equal; we cannot fail in our breadth and come into true wisdom, true breadth means inclusion—this may vary in degree, but there must never be exclusion of anything in the well-rounded character, there is conscious selection, but never exclusion; there is nothing ...
— Freedom Talks No. II • Julia Seton, M.D.
... growing factory. Each had technical knowledge enough to run a plant three times the size. But all failed. The first was an autocrat, who tried to boss from a pedestal, and the men didn't like him. The next was a politician, whom the men liked thoroughly—which was his shortcoming, for he tried to run the place as they thought it should be run. As for the third, he tried to run it on nerves, to do everything himself, to be everywhere at once. He didn't fail, really—he snapped like a fiddle-string. By that ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... of the list of offenses for which extradition may be claimed and granted is most desirable between this country and Great Britain. The territory of neither should become a secure harbor for the evil doers of the other through any avoidable shortcoming in this regard. A new treaty on this subject between the two powers has been recently negotiated and will soon be laid before ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... uncomplimentary to the colored man's interest in the professional and business ventures of his race-variety can be of weight, there are several antecedent facts of primal value to be considered. If devotion to either class is lacking, it must be remembered, that shortcoming is traceable to causes which, however marked may be their effects in the Negro's case, are equally marked and striking in others of similar condition. Given centuries of environments and discipline hostile to the development of racial pride and co-operation, ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... I be of my deeds in the service of my master, and that shalt thou see," said I. "I lack not the spirit, nor the will, but I lack experience woefully; and, because of that shortcoming, must bow ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... sometimes to intensify their dynamic or expressive force while they sound. The tone of the pianoforte, being produced by a blow, begins to die the moment it is created. The history of the instrument's mechanism, and also of its technical manipulation, is the history of an effort to reduce this shortcoming to a minimum. It has always conditioned the character of the music composed for the instrument, and if we were not in danger of being led into too wide an excursion, it would be profitable to trace the parallelism which is disclosed by the mechanical evolution of the instrument, ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... That he was unusual, no one will deny; that he was the originator of many of China's greatest reform measures, is equally true; but that he lacked the power to execute what he conceived, and the ability to select great statesmen to assist him, seems to have been his chief shortcoming. ...
— Court Life in China • Isaac Taylor Headland
... do I, Giraffe," replied the other. "And d'ye know, this makes me think of that Injun that got lost, and was found, half starved, by some white men; but he was too proud to admit his little shortcoming; so when they asked him if he hadn't kinder managed to get twisted in his bearings, he slaps his breast with his hand, take a pose like this, and says he: 'Injun not lost; wigwam lost; Injun here!' And we're like that Injun, Giraffe; oh! no, we're not lost one little ...
— The Boy Scouts in the Maine Woods - The New Test for the Silver Fox Patrol • Herbert Carter
... increasing visits. His obtuseness on the great Testimonial question was not calculated to awaken admiration in the paternal breast, but had rather a tendency to give offence in that sensitive quarter, and to be regarded as a positive shortcoming in point of gentlemanly feeling. An impression of disappointment, occasioned by the discovery that Mr Clennam scarcely possessed that delicacy for which, in the confidence of his nature, he had been inclined to give him credit, began to darken the fatherly mind in ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... to write that. It spoke in his whimsical fashion the attitude of humility, the ready acknowledgment of shortcoming, which was his chief characteristic and made him lovable—in his personality ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... closed the door, saying nothing. A touch of panic rippled through her. He was so silent, so unbending, so impersonal. Was this a reflection of her inability to communicate with him? Could their relationship fail because of this shortcoming on her part? What good was love if you couldn't communicate it to ...
— Ten From Infinity • Paul W. Fairman
... toilet, she repaired, with all the haste possible, to the breakfast room, where her consciousness of shortcoming was in nowise lessened when she saw who occupied the seat at her father's right ...
— Faith Gartney's Girlhood • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... unite with them in the way of resistance to the law. There have even been found here among us those who have signed agreements to disobey such as are set over us, unmindful of the order to render to Caesar that which is his. Let there be among Friends neither fear nor any shortcoming. Let us bear testimony against evil-doers, whether they be of us or not. Let us cut down and utterly cast forth those who depart from righteousness. Are they not of the scum which riseth on the boiling pot? There is a time for Friends to remonstrate, and a time to act. I fear lest these too ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... taken a high place among the finest if not among the greatest of English poets if he had but had the sense of form—the instinct of composition. Whether it was modesty, indolence, indifference, or incompetence, some drawback or shortcoming there was which so far impaired the quality of his strong and delicate genius that it is impossible for his most ardent and cordial admirer to say or think of his very best work that it really does him justice—that it adequately represents the fulness of his unquestionable powers. And yet ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... a group and waited contentedly, smoking, chatting, and laughing. Alessandro walked up and down between the kitchen and the shed. He could hear the sounds of rattling dishes, jingling spoons, frying, pouring water. Savory smells began to be wafted out. Evidently old Marda meant to atone for the shortcoming of the noon. Juan Can, in his bed, also heard and smelled what was going on. "May the fiends get me," he growled, "if that wasteful old hussy isn't getting up a feast for those beasts of Indians! There's ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... avoid each but not every act of sin, except by grace, as stated above. Nevertheless, since it is by his own shortcoming that he does not prepare himself to have grace, the fact that he cannot avoid sin without grace does not excuse him ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... fable extant of a man who tried to please everybody, and his failure is a matter of record. Robinson Asbury was not more successful. But be it said that his ill success was due to no fault or shortcoming ...
— The heart of happy hollow - A collection of stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... a pity it could not borrow from Paris the towers of Notre Dame! But the glory of its interior made up for this shortcoming. Among the monuments, one to Rear Admiral Charles Holmes, a descendant, perhaps, of another namesake, immortalized by Dryden in ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... world still kept a grip on them: their several systems were intrinsically incomplete. Some of them put religious liberty in the first place; others, political; but each had its inconsistency, or its shortcoming. None had gone quite to the root of the matter. What was that root?—or, let us say, the mother lode, of which these were ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... certain haziness of memory concerning the marriage and baptismal services: "No, little boy, if this conduct continues, I shall think that you neither love, honor, nor obey me!" However, the culprit was much impressed with a sense of shortcoming as to the obligations he had undertaken; so the result was as satisfactory as if the quotation had been from ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... disposition, but very conservative in their ideas. Outwardly polite, they are not unfrequently coarse in conversation. If the Canadian evinces respect, it is expected that he will be treated with respect in consideration therefor. His chief shortcoming is excessive sociability. When once settled among friends and relatives he cannot leave them—absence from home does in truth only make the heart grow fonder of home associations. He is active, compactly made, but generally below rather than above the middle size. ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... stealthy movements in the adjoining room. She wove her needle into the seam, a practise so habitual that probably she would have done the same if the lamp had exploded unexpectedly, and crossing to the kitchen door, opened it without warning. A small untidy woman, the shortcoming of her appearance partly concealed by the old plaid shawl that enveloped her person, dodged away from the key-hole with a celerity ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... AN UNDERLYING LACK.—All shortcoming in the old time teaching may be traced to lack of standards. The worker had never been measured, hence had no idea of his efficiency, or of possible efficiency. No standard methods made plain the manner in which the work should be done. Moreover, no standard division and assignment of ...
— The Psychology of Management - The Function of the Mind in Determining, Teaching and - Installing Methods of Least Waste • L. M. Gilbreth
... themselves to satirical treatment, and, although he is in many ways a remarkable realist, he has very little dramatic power, and seems to lack the gift of searching analysis of individual character. It is hardly fair to reckon it as a shortcoming in the poet and apostle of Provence that he presents only what is most beautiful in the life about him. The novelist offers us a faithful and vivid image of the men of his own day. The poet glorifies the past, clings to tradition, and exhorts his ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... An aversion for physical shortcoming, from her mother's occasional headaches to the mortally afflicted Mr. Hazzard with the great chronic sore crisscrossed with court plaster at the end of one of his eyes, amounted in Lilly ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... sense; intellect, as we have said, peculiarly separating and vast; the moral sentiments like in essence, but boundlessly expanded, as attached to an infinite object, and laboring in an infinite field: each part mortal in its shortcoming, immortal in the accomplishment of its perfection and purpose; the opposition which we at first broadly expressed as between body and spirit, being more strictly between the natural and spiritual condition of the entire creature—body ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... till the sound of her horse's footsteps died away on the road; and then, sinking on her knees beside her rocking-chair, she poured forth her whole heart in prayers and tears. She confessed many a fault and shortcoming that none knew but herself, and most earnestly besought help that "her little rushlight might shine bright." Prayer was to little Ellen what it is to all that know it—the satisfying of doubt, the soothing of care, the quieting of trouble. She ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Susan Warner
... Mellicent was often untidy, and even Esther had moments of dishevelment, but Peggy was a dainty little person, whose hair was always smooth, whose dress well brushed and natty. Her artistic sense was too keen to allow of any shortcoming in this respect; but she seemed blessed with a capacity of acting before she thought, which had many disastrous consequences. She was by no means a robust girl, and Mrs Asplin fussed over her little ailments like an old mother-hen with a delicate nursling. One prescription ...
— About Peggy Saville • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... not have said of himself, he had wronged no man; he had given much to charity and more to the 'imprisoned' head of the Church. He had so lived that no confessor could justly find fault with him, and he had never failed to pray for those in whom he discerned any shortcoming. ...
— The White Sister • F. Marion Crawford
... interests, into the centre and criterion of all things. Hence arises our notion of evil. If the universe be what this philosophy has described it, the perfection which it assigns to God is extended to everything, and evil is of course impossible; there is no shortcoming either in nature or in man; each person and each thing is exactly what it has the power to be, and nothing more. But men imagining that all things exist on their account, and perceiving their own interests, bodily and spiritual, capable of being variously affected, have conceived ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... are running in and out of each other's houses, so that her mother might as well have no daughter at all." I do beg that none of you will bring this discredit on school life, for the system gets blamed when it is really your individual shortcoming which is in fault; you ought to be big enough to hold both school and home interests! But, setting aside this form of term-time selfishness, which we shall all agree to condemn, there remains another form of it, which is a duty. You must put lessons first, ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... It may be slow in offering the riches of the Gospel to the unconverted world, but where it has presented the Gospel, it presents it to all men as a Gospel of salvation and sanctification. When tempted to discouragement let us remember that whatever the shortcoming of the Church, it is yet true that every man, woman and child in these United States of America can through its instrumentality, become a saint whenever he desires. But, naturally, to become a saint, effort ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... spaces occupied by tiny Attica and cramped England. At the same time, our critics somewhat too easily forgot that material must make ready the foundation for ideal triumphs, that the arts have no chance in poor countries. But it must be allowed that democracy stood for a great deal in our shortcoming. The Edinburgh Review never would have thought of asking, "Who reads a Russian book?" and England was satisfied with iron from Sweden without being impertinently inquisitive after her painters and statuaries. ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... godliness grows as far downwards in self-emptying, self-denial, and self-abasing, in hungering and thirsting after more of righteousness, in the secret engagements of the heart to God in Christ, in these burstings of heart and bleeding of soul, to which God alone is witness, because of shortcoming in holiness, because of a body of death within, and because of that law in the members warring against the law of the mind, and bringing often into captivity to the law of sin, as it grows upward in a profession. And this is that pure ...
— Christ The Way, The Truth, and The Life • John Brown (of Wamphray)
... A man bears the weight of his own body without knowing it, but he soon feels the weight of any other, if he tries to move it; in the same way, a man can see other people's shortcoming's and vices, but he is blind to his own. This arrangement has one advantage: it turns other people into a kind of mirror, in which a man can see clearly everything that is vicious, faulty, ill-bred and loathsome in his own nature; only, it is generally the old story of the dog barking at is ...
— Counsels and Maxims - From The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... complaint or blame. Her greatest hope was that the advent of the child would induce from him something of the consideration and tenderness that he had never given her. She believed it was some fault, some shortcoming, of hers that had kept it from her. It didn't occur to her that it might be the beauty of ...
— The Crooked House • Brandon Fleming
... grossness!" he exclaimed, "what an original shortcoming in the more delicate spiritual perceptions, is shown by the natural growth amongst us of such hideous names—Higginbottom, Stiggins, Bugg! In Ionia and Attica they were luckier in this respect than "the best race in the ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... below my window and dimly wonder if I should get out at all on the morrow. If not, I proposed to return to Montreal at once. I should gain nothing by being confined in the house at Bonneroy. Delle Josephine appeared with eggs and tea—green tea, alas for that village shortcoming— there was no black tea to be found in it, and I looked narrowly at her as she set it down, wondering if anything was amiss with her. But she seemed all right again and I conjectured that I had simply ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... English became blurred with regard to grammar; the local speech was good enough for him. When Jock's Past became troublesome, as it had done from the very first, the Black Cat had consolation for its latest recruit; and, while he did not sink quite so far as some of the natives, the shortcoming was attributed more to youth than to the putting on of airifications, ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... that one thus looks upon the author's soul in its nakedness, leaves small chance for self-unconsciousness. Edith could not help examining her mental attitude toward her companions, and it was perhaps a proof of the sweetness of her nature that she found in her thought nothing of that shortcoming in them, or reason for lack of fervor in friendship other than such as must ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... is the golden lesson, the first and the last which man has to learn on earth, ay, and through all eternity: "I am nothing; God is all in all." All in us which is worth calling anything; all in us which is worth having, or worth being; all in us which is not disobedience and shortcoming, failure and mistake, ignorance and madness, filthiness and fierceness, as of the beasts which perish; all strength in us, all understanding, all prudence, all right-mindedness, all purity, all justice, ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... Driscoll as though he had. But getting no answer, he seemed mollified, as though this proved that the man who had said it was an imbecile. Murguia, by the way, had come to hate no truth more soulfully than the palpable shortcoming of life in the matter of beer and skittles. And now it was borne in upon him again, for the skipper announced, definitely and with an oath, that they'd have to begin throwing ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... been living in Germany during the war I would have felt a powerful tendency to defend the cause of the Allies, to excuse their misdeeds, to overrate their ability, while being highly critical and censorious of every German shortcoming. ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt
... comparison with other men; and therefore the repugnance to futility to a good extent coalesces with the incentive of emulation. It acts to accentuate the struggle for pecuniary reputability by visiting with a sharper disapproval all shortcoming and all evidence of shortcoming in point of pecuniary success. Purposeful effort comes to mean, primarily, effort directed to or resulting in a more creditable showing of accumulated wealth. Among the motives which lead men to accumulate wealth, the primacy, both in scope and intensity, ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... give growth, with all its immortal issues, a place, and means, and opportunity,—this was Goethe's aim; and if the execution be less than perfect, as I admit, it yet suggests the whole; and if the shortcoming be due in part to his personal imperfections, which doubtless may be affirmed, it yet does not mar the sincerity of his effort. His hand trembles, his aim is not nicely sure, but it is an aim at the right ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... can soften every sort of bitterness. But I cannot believe that it has any power over remorse. It is better that mother should think some person guilty of Victor's death, than that she should connect it with a weakness of her son or a shortcoming of ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... bad to worse." Catherine's sorrowful denunciations of the sins of the Church recall the thought of Dante, the thought of Petrarch—which is also the thought of all the great saints, seers, and loyal Catholics, to whom through the Christian ages the shortcoming of their spiritual mother has meant grief beyond words. The lovely conception of Holy Church as a garden, borrowed though it be from Holy Writ, she has made peculiarly her own by constant repetition. We recognize ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa
... The only test of a work of Art is, how far it will carry us,—not any comparison by the yardstick. We demand to be raised above our habitual point of view, and be made aware of a deeper interest than we knew of. It is in hope of this alone that we pardon the necessary shortcoming of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... hand, if in following these lines we can contrive to adhere faithfully to the worldwide laws of all true art, who knows but our very gardening may tend to correct more than one shortcoming or excess in ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable
... to hear it. . . . Between ourselves, there is always something lacking in an abstainer—as in a man who has never learnt Greek. It is difficult with both to say what the lack precisely is; but with both it includes an absolute insensibility to the shortcoming." ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... in Japan, as in the Isle of Man, with stumps, where they should have tails. Sometimes this is the result of art, sometimes of a natural shortcoming. The cats of Yedo are of bad repute as mousers, their energies being relaxed by much petting at the hands of ladies. The Cat of Nabeshima, so says tradition, was ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... events is done in a corner; everything is openly discussed and investigated. Every week the visiting committee go round the house, and enter every ward and store-room. They taste and test the provisions, and the least shortcoming is certain to be severely brought home to those who are fulfilling the contracts. They pass through the dormitories, and see that everything is clean; woe betide those responsible if a spot of dirt be visible! There ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... of our hero's mouth when there was a rolling crash of musketry, accompanied by wild shouts, and a shower of bullets flew zipping over their heads. Shooting high is the invariable shortcoming of excited marksmen. A moment later the heads of a large force of American riflemen rose from the rocky ambuscade above and behind them. The next instant the enemy was in full charge, evidently bent on capturing both the ...
— The Story of Isaac Brock - Hero, Defender and Saviour of Upper Canada, 1812 • Walter R. Nursey
... indebtedness to Godkin, it is with some reluctance that I present a certain phase of his thought which was regretted by many of his best friends, and which undoubtedly limited his influence in the later years of his life. A knowledge of this shortcoming is, however, essential to a thorough comprehension of the man. It is frequently said that Godkin rarely, if ever, made a retraction or a rectification of personal charges shown to be incorrect. A thorough search of The Nation's columns would be necessary fully to substantiate this statement, ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... The shortcoming of the Stoics is not in the superiority to fortune which they seek; but in the fact that they seek it directly by sheer effort of naked will, instead of being lifted above subjection to fortune by the attractive power of generous aims, and high ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... the tones of a harsh voice are excruciating; and if among our statesmen and other public speakers "silver tongues" are rare, they are much more so among our preachers. The Church of Rome does not admit into the priesthood men who have any bodily shortcoming or defect; it would also be well if all candidates for holy orders in the English and Scottish Churches whose voices are not at least tolerable were rejected, as unfit to preach! Saadi seems to have had a great horror of braying orators, and relates a number of anecdotes about them, such as this: ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... is noble, according to their intellectual power and earnestness, as Raffaelle in his St. Cecilia, (a mere study of a passionate, dark-eyed, large formed Italian model,) and even Perugino, in that there is about his noblest faces a shortcoming, indefinable; an absence of the full outpouring of the sacred spirit that there is in Angelico; traceable, I doubt not, to some deficiencies and avaricious flaws of his heart, whose consequences in his conduct were such as to give Vasari hope that his lies might stick ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... Early marriages were the rule, and families of a dozen or more children had to be supported from the produce of a few arpents. To maintain such a family as this every one had to work hard in the growing season, and even the women went to the fields in the harvest-time. One serious shortcoming of the habitant was his lack of steadfastness in labor. There was a roving strain in his Norman blood. He could not stay long at any one job; there was a restlessness in his temperament which would not down. He would leave his fields unploughed in order to go hunting or to turn ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro
... there is no more reason to suppose that he is a competent moralist than there is to suppose that I am a competent mathematician. But truly it does not matter whether he is a moralist or not. Let nobody dream for a moment that what is wrong with the Censorship is the shortcoming of the gentleman who happens at any moment to be acting as Censor. Replace him to-morrow by an Academy of Letters and an Academy of Dramatic Poetry, and the new and enlarged filter will still exclude original and epoch-making work, ...
— Mrs. Warren's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... coherent thought in the young man's mind. His consciousness seemed to be full of rebellion, longing and amazement. Never in his life had he been refused anything he greatly desired, when he had justice on his side. Now he was rejected, not for a shortcoming, but, according to his religious lights, for a virtue instead. His gaze searched the visible portion of the other chamber and found Rachel. In the half-light he saw that she had cast herself down against ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... He knew nothing of vintages; it sufficed him to distinguish between Bordeaux and Burgundy; yet one saw him raise his glass and peer at the liquor with eye of connoisseur. All unaffectedly; for he was conscious of his shortcoming in the art of delicate living, and never vaunted his satisfactions. He had known the pasture of poverty, and the table as it is set by London landladies; to look back on these things was to congratulate ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... shows what in the Service is known as a good front, it is not a very athletic or puissant cohort this, that stands on parade here on the grass within hearing of the church bells. The grizzled old soldiers, sooth to say, look rather the worse for wear. There is a decided shortcoming among them of the proper complement of limbs, and one at least, in speaking of the battlefields he had seen, might with truth echo the old soldier in ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... 1). The clause attached to both these explanations (viz. 'That is the immortal, the fearless; that is Brahman') shows, at the same time, the individual soul to be free from sin, and the like. After that Prajapati, having discovered a shortcoming in the condition of deep sleep (in consequence of the expostulation of Indra, 'In that way he does not know himself that he is I, nor does he know these beings,' VIII, 11, 2), enters on a further explanation ('I shall explain him further to you, and nothing more than this'), begins by blaming the ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... away, and the sin is not there, and you forget all about it. That is the very snare of sin. Or you become a little better in a point that you were trying to cultivate. In that grace you are a shade improved. But that only brings out more astoundingly your frightful shortcoming in other particulars. Now, adopting Paul's method, this happens: Christ acts on our character just as a person acts upon a mirror. The whole image is reflected at once. How is it that society moulds a man? How can you tell in what class in ...
— How to become like Christ • Marcus Dods
... had full command of the phraseology of the demagog. His only shortcoming in the eyes of his own party was that he had not been persecuted by the Government. The officials, alas, soon supplied this deficiency. A few days before the Presidential election in July, 1910, when making a speech in Monterey, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... acquired, is dramatically unessential. Two of these powers belong in generous measure to Dr. Conan Doyle. The third, which is as necessary to complete success, he has not yet displayed. In 'Rodney Stone' an attempt has been made to cover up this shortcoming, in the form in which the story has been cast, and in the very choice of its title. But when the book comes to be read it is not the tale of Rodney Stone (who is a mere outsider privileged to narrate), but of his fashionable uncle's ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... of these cherished lofty disdain for the other. Frank looked down upon the school-boy as an unlicked cub without two ideas; the bodily defect he endeavoured to cure by frequent outward applications, but the mental shortcoming was beneath his efforts. Johnny meanwhile, who was as hard as nails, no sooner recovered from a thumping than he renewed and redoubled his loud contempt for a great lout over six feet high, who had never drawn a sword or pulled a trigger. And now for the winter this ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... happy in this quiet place; the window-shutters in front of it remained always closed. Her room, hung with bright chintz, looked out on a large garden. Madame Alessandri, whose only shortcoming was that she liked to talk about her intimate acquaintanceship with eminent physicians, showed her the utmost attention. Her associates, nearly all provincial young ladies, were exceedingly bored, as they had nobody to come to see them. Rosanette saw that they regarded her with envy, and told ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... The first lesson will be that we should take time, and that we should humble ourselves before God, at the thought of what this self is in us; put down to the account of the self every sin, every shortcoming, all failure, and all that has been dishonoring to God, and then say, "Lord, this is what I am;" and then let us allow the blessed Jesus Christ to take entire control of our life, in the faith that ...
— The Master's Indwelling • Andrew Murray
... with its own dying!). Let us come as fast as we can to letting the seed-vessel go as well as the leaves, God wants to bring us to a life of childlike simplicity, taken up with His Christ; always lower and lower at His feet in the consciousness of shortcoming and unworthiness as His Glory shines, but with our spiritual selves and all their intricacies fading out of sight before Him. As we go on, we learn to draw the supply of every need for spirit and ...
— Parables of the Christ-life • I. Lilias Trotter
... always increases with every new progress in duty. The field of light expands to a new length and breadth every time the plough passes through it. And, knowing well to whom he writes on this subject, Rutherford goes on to say that there is a sorrow for sin, and for shortcoming in service, that is as acceptable with God in the evangelical covenant as would be the very service itself. But, then, it must be what Rutherford calls 'honest sorrow after a sincere aim.' And let no man easily allow himself to ...
— Samuel Rutherford - and some of his correspondents • Alexander Whyte
... craftsmanship, very much like Bunin and very unlike the usual idea we have of Pilniak. The only thing Pilniak was incapable of taking from his model was Bunin's wonderfully rich and full Russian, a shortcoming which is least likely to ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... eighteenth-century idiosyncrasy; in the second some; and it was by no means absent from Byron though hardly present at all in most respects as regards Shelley and Keats. Certainly in none of the groups, and only in one or two individuals, is there much if any shortcoming as concerns letter-writing. Wordsworth indeed makes no figure as a letter-writer, and nobody who has appreciated his other work would expect him to do so. The first requisite of the letter-writer is "freedom"—in a rather peculiar sense ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... be imputed to John as a fault or a shortcoming that he did not for a long time realize his father's failing powers. True, as has been stated, he had noted some changes in appearance on his return, but they were not great enough to be startling, and, though ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... expedition are interesting to me to record, though probably many will think them superfluous. Perhaps they will serve to give a true idea of the magnitude of the undertaking, and of the great responsibility which weighed upon me, and thus prove an anticipatory excuse for any accusation of shortcoming or dilatoriness that may be preferred against me. I will not, however, enter further into the business-details of the expedition—merely observing that, among other things to which I had to attend during my stay in Mourzuk, were, in the first place, to collect provisions and stores for a journey ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1 • James Richardson
... there had been all these rejoicings and tribulations at the great doings on the Rhine and the shortcoming in Friesland, the real operations of the war ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the same shortcoming as the others. While accounting for the capture, it does not explain the resistance of the women. In real capture they had real reasons for kicking, biting, and howling, but why should they continue these antics in cases of sham capture? Obviously ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... shortcoming of the emancipation of the present day lies in its artificial stiffness and its narrow respectabilities, which produce an emptiness in woman's soul that will not let her drink from the fountain of life. I once remarked that there seemed to be a deeper relationship between ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... fatherless, Shield of the stranger, glorify thy name, magnify thy grace: all these thou hast been to me; give these parents deep humility, if they have received grace to be more faithful than I; yet thy holy eye has seen much shortcoming in them also. Glory to thy name for the grace in which they stand, and that thou hast enabled them to train up these children for thee. Oh, let this be a heart-searching time with us all; humble us, and exalt thy name, and magnify ...
— The Power of Faith - Exemplified In The Life And Writings Of The Late Mrs. Isabella Graham. • Isabella Graham
... centered on a pool of cool water, very pleasant in the hothouse climate of Singhalut. The only shortcoming was the lack of the lovely young servitors Murphy had envisioned. He took it upon himself to repair this lack, and in a shady wine-house behind the palace, called the Barangipan, he made the acquaintance of a girl-musician named Soek Panjoebang. He ...
— Sjambak • John Holbrook Vance
... felt abashed. How can we expect the heathen to become Christians, when those who call themselves so show so little regard to the religion of Christ? I see the same sad shortcoming on shore. Christians do not strive to bring honour to ...
— The Cruise of the Mary Rose - Here and There in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston |
