"Unfitness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... authority of Pope, that his acceptance now was owing only to the influence of his wife. Even if there is no ground, as there probably is not, for the allegation of Addison's inefficiency in the details of business, his unfitness for such an office in such circumstances was undeniable and glaring. It was impossible that a government, whose secretary of state could not open his lips in debate, should long face an opposition headed by Robert Walpole. The decay of Addison's health, too, was going on rapidly, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... will ever learn the uselessness of such efforts is yet a matter for prophecy. Miss Hyde heard all that was said, and replied very quietly, "I don't believe it." And as Mrs. Perkins had no tangible proofs of Abner Dimock's unfitness to marry Judge Hyde's daughter, the lady in question got the better of her adviser, so far as any argument was concerned, and effectually put an end to remonstrance by declaring with extreme ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... though he were willing to devote himself certainly and instantly to the worst fate that he had pictured to himself,—could he immediately rush away from these abstract speculations, encumbered as they were with personal flattery, into his own most unpleasant, most tragic matter! It was the unfitness that deterred him and not the possible tragedy. Nevertheless, through it all, he was sure,—nearly sure,—that she was playing her game, and playing it in direct antagonism to the game which she knew that he wanted to play. Would it not be better that he should go ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... reaching Melbourne, he sold everything he possessed, and that not being sufficient, he borrowed enough to pay his passage back to England, where, doubtless, he will swell the number of those whose lack of success in the colonies, and vituperations against them, are only equalled by their unfitness ever ...
— A Lady's Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852-53. • Mrs. Charles (Ellen) Clacey
... Freeman has failed to perceive that amusement is as needful and almost as necessary as food and raiment. The absurdity of the further charge as to the general brutality of the pursuit, and its consequent unfitness for an educated man, is to be attributed to Mr. Freeman's ignorance of what is really done and said in the hunting-field,—perhaps to his misunderstanding of Cicero's words. There was a rejoinder to my answer, and I asked for space for further remarks. I could have it, the editor said, if ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... secretly resolved to leave it as soon as he believed he could do so without leading to any surmises respecting the true cause of the change he contemplated. Accordingly, in a few months, he began to suggest his own unfitness for making a profitable partner in country trade, and finally came out with a direct proposition to his brother to buy him out at a sum which he knew would be a temptingly low one. And the result was, that the proposition was accepted, "the partnership dissolved by mutual consent," ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... I am worthy to wear the shoulder-straps of an army officer. The shoulder-straps stand for the strictest sense of honor in all things. If I depart, ever so little, from the laws of honor, I prove my unfitness to wear shoulder-straps. Have I ...
— The Young Engineers on the Gulf - The Dread Mystery of the Million Dollar Breakwater • H. Irving Hancock
... valuer's bias or interest inclines him to apprehend the object in the one or the other of these aspects. It follows not infrequently that the marks of cheapness or commonness are accepted as definitive marks of artistic unfitness, and a code or schedule of aesthetic proprieties on the one hand, and of aesthetic abominations on the other, is constructed on this basis for ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... to their ostentatious self-righteousness, pathetically shows the unfitness of pitting against one another teachers who share in an equality of forlorn destitution and contempt (iv. 6-13). He concludes this section with an affectionate but authoritative speech: he says that he has sent Timothy to Corinth, and hopes shortly ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... pitiless attrition goes on. There is no action: there is being. The struggle is rooted in the deep divisions of men's souls, not in unwonted crime or plotting. And Anna Mahr, the free woman of a freer world, parts from Johannes because she recognises their human unfitness to take up the burden of tragic sorrow which any union between them must create. The time for such things has not come, and may never come. Thus Johannes is left desolate, powerless to face the unendurable emptiness and decay that lie before ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... little except in contemplation, and with so small an admixture of practical experience of human nature, that he looked at the young thing before him and was conscious of his unreadiness, and in some sort of his unfitness, to minister ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... it was not surprising that the meeting between father and son, immediately after Stephen Sanford arrived in Washington, should have ended in a declaration of war. During the interview Allen gave abundant evidence of his unfitness for anything which required diplomacy; and his father, surprised to find in the boy a will as unyielding as his own, and angered beyond expression by Allen's opposition, lost all control over himself and stamped out of the ...
— The Lever - A Novel • William Dana Orcutt
... with such grand persons; but at the present moment, when she grudged herself even a new pair of gloves out of the money remaining to her, while she was still looking forward to a future life passed as a nurse in a hospital, she felt that there would be an absolute unfitness in such ...
— Miss Mackenzie • Anthony Trollope
... China came as somewhat of a surprise. The complete victory of the Island Nation in that struggle was, I know, to a certain extent discounted in some quarters by the stories that were published as to the wretched condition of both the Chinese Army and Navy, their utter unfitness and unpreparedness for war, the incompetence and corruption of the officers, and so on. There were many otherwise well informed persons who felt confident that though Japan had experienced little or no difficulty ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... which occasions his frequent sickness, absences from work and poverty. And I am convinced, moreover, that it answers no purpose to admonish him." Yet, though "I am so well satisfied of Thomas Green's unfitness to look after Carpenters," for a time "the helpless situation in which you find his family, has prevailed on me to retain him," and when he finally had to be discharged for drinking, Washington said, "Nothing but compassion for his helpless family, has hitherto induced me to keep him a ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... permitted to detach from political reasonings, foreign to the nature and object of this work, a few sentences referring more immediately to the personal character of Anjou, and displaying in a strong light the enormous unfitness of the connexion; and also the animated and affectionate conclusion by which the writer seems desirous to atone for the enunciation ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... her irony should touch one of Mr. Kane's ideals. It was so beautiful of him to think himself not big enough for Althea, that she was well content that he should see Gerald in the same category of unfitness. Perhaps Gerald was not big enough for Althea; Gerald's bigness didn't interest Helen; the great point for her was that Mr. Kane should not guess that she considered Althea not big enough for him. ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... what weariness their haste oppressed me. As for them, they somehow blamed me for dropping out. I knew. Until we ourselves understand, we accept no excuse from the man who stops. While I felt it all, I was not bitter. I did not seem to care. I said to myself: "This is Unfitness. I survive no longer. So ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... two babies, three babies; before the birth of the third, John's brow was again clouded, again he had begun to rail and fume at the unfitness of things. His business was a failure, partly because he dealt with a too rigid honesty, partly because of his unstable nature, which left him at the mercy of whims and obstinacies and airy projects. He did not risk ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... volunteered. There were many others who had not actually done so, but there was no doubt as to what their answer would be. Of the remainder many were practically disqualified from serving abroad by reason of age, unfitness, family and business ties, and other reasons, and for them, in the light of the little we knew then, the decision was most difficult, and the need for it we hardly thought fair. The demand for volunteers was in the first instance ...
— The Sherwood Foresters in the Great War 1914 - 1919 - History of the 1/8th Battalion • W.C.C. Weetman
... months of training in the telephone school. Since during the first half-year, in which the employee still works entirely under supervision, more than a third of those who had originally entered leave, partly on account of unfitness, and inability, partly on account of over-fatigue or similar reasons, the economic disadvantage to the company is evidently a very great one. The candidates are paid for months of mere training, ...
— Psychology and Industrial Efficiency • Hugo Muensterberg
... I mean the unfitness of the persons marrying to enter into this state, and that both with respect to age and the constitution of their bodies; and, therefore, those who design to enter into that condition ought to observe ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous
... So don't haul poor ME up—I assure you I've worries enough." One of these, visibly, was that the spell rejoiced in by the schoolroom fire was already in danger of breaking; another was that she was finally forced to make no secret of her husband's unfitness for real responsibilities. The day came indeed when her breathless auditors learnt from her in bewilderment that what ailed him was that he was, alas, simply not serious. Maisie wept on Mrs. Wix's bosom after hearing that Sir ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... 19th. Solemn thoughts yesterday in reading that solemn tract, "The Inconvenient Season." In visiting I met with another affecting illustration of the unfitness of old age for beginning religion, in the senseless self-righteousness of poor old Mary N. She says every night and morning the prayers she learned when a child, which she evidently thinks an abundant ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall
... one Englishman willing to help him in all his schemes, in the person of Tostig, Harold's brother, who had been outlawed at the demand of the nation, owing to his unfitness to rule his province as Earl of Northumberland. He had sunk from bad to worse. Harold had done all he could for his fallen brother, but to restore him was impossible. Tostig was at the Norman court, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... sit merely to register the edicts of the House of Commons, and be told that we're a pack of fools when we hesitate." I told him that it was the unfortunate destiny of a House of Lords to be made to see her own unfitness for ...
— The Fixed Period • Anthony Trollope
... falling into well-deserved trouble for some escapade with the young women of Geneva. Thus on both sides there was a certain nervous instability, an uncontrollable wayward emotionality. But of actual insanity, of nervous disorder, of any decided abnormality or downright unfitness in either father or mother, not a sign. Isaac Rousseau and Susanne Bernard would have been passed by the most ferocious eugenist. It is again a case in which the chances of convergent heredity have produced a result which in its magnitude, ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... that such an indictment destroys itself. It recoils upon its framers, and proves nothing but their intense hatred of their victims and their total unfitness to sit ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... college stuff to us?" What right indeed? She was convinced, in short, that she had been embarked upon a hopeless piece of snobbery, and, finding the whole business distasteful, it had not been difficult to discover her unfitness. ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... father, who was a prosperous banker in Wall Street, had sternly vetoed an artistic career for his only son. Alston had rebelled, then had given in for a time, and gone into Wall Street. Instead of proving his unfitness for a career he loathed, he showed a marked aptitude for business, inherited no doubt from his father. He could do well what he hated doing. This fact accentuated his father's wrath when he abruptly threw up business and finally decided that he would be a singer or nothing. The Wall ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... thing needful was therefore to have sought through much prayer and Bible study to get first of all a deeper knowledge and a deeper experience of divine things. Impatience to settle a matter so important was itself seen to be a positive disqualification for true service, revealing unfitness to endure hardship as a good soldier of Jesus Christ. There is a constant strain and drain on patient waiting which is a necessary feature of missionary trial and particularly the trial of deferred harvests. One who, at the outset, could ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... his repentance was short-lived; but the one act of grace he did before leaving his sick bed was to fill up the empty throne at Canterbury by the appointment of Anselm—Anselm's protests of unfitness notwithstanding. Then, on the King's recovery, as though to make up for the penitence displayed, all the royal promises of amendment were broken without shame, and "all the evil which the King had wrought before ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... sense of being a square peg, which fitted into none of the round holes of her world; the wisdom she had got, the experience she was richer by, had, in the process of equipping her for life, merely seemed to disclose her unfitness. She could not then know that, even for the squarest peg, the right hole may ultimately be found; seeming unfitness prove to be only another aspect of a peculiar and special fitness. But, of the after years, and what they ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... hand, the opposite school was termed 'Barnburners,' in allusion to the story of an old Dutchman, who relieved himself of rats by burning his barns, which they infested—just like exterminating all banks and corporations to root out the abuses connected therewith. The fitness or unfitness of these family terms of endearment is none of our ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... translated the Bible into German. Catholics, of course, cannot deny that Luther did translate the Bible, and that his translation is still a cherished treasure of Protestants; but in order to belittle this achievement of Luther, which inflicted incalculable damage on Rome, they talk about Luther's unfitness for the work of Bible-translation and about the unwarranted liberties Luther ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... began Durant saw a faint hope of release in his own stupidity, his obvious unfitness for the game. By a studied carelessness, an artful exaggeration of his deficiencies, he courted humiliation, ejection in favor of the dummy. But, as it happened, either his evil destiny had endowed him with her own detestable skill, or else his ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... and bravery of Kit Carson, than the fact that he was at once selected to lead the party on its dangerous errand. While he was as modest as a woman and with a voice as gentle and persuasive, he could not be ignorant of his own capacities, and he assumed charge without any pretense of unfitness. ...
— The Life of Kit Carson • Edward S. Ellis
... point with anxious gravity, was to receive a practical demonstration of the eternal unfitness of things." ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... hardly set sail when the unfitness of the emigrants for their work began to discover itself. Lying weather-bound within sight of home, "some few, little better than atheists, of the greatest rank among them," were busying themselves with scandalous imputations upon the chaplain, then lying dangerously ill in his berth. All ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... uncouth, in the midst of these surroundings, with a perceptible sense of something very strange in it all. His mild, gentle regard dwelt too on the two beautiful children, evidently with a sense of quiet wonder how they should be here, and altogether a sense of their unfitness; they, meanwhile, stood a little apart, looking at him, somewhat disturbed and awed, as children usually are, by a sense that the stranger was not perfectly well, that he had been injured, and so set apart from ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... almost a touch of genius in the remark. Its very vacuity told of the man's exceeding unfitness for the role thrust upon him by certain desperadoes ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... supervision over all the administrative work arising under the act. It has extensive powers of control over the appointment of trustees, and conducts an audit of their accounts; and it may, subject to appeal to the court, remove them from office for misconduct, neglect or unfitness. A report upon the proceedings under the act is annually presented to parliament by the Board of Trade, and although the department is practically self-supporting, a nominal vote is each year placed ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... proceeding with his examination he was exceedingly anxious lest he should reveal to Ike any suspicion as to his unfitness for the step he proposed to take. At the same time, he was filled with anxiety lest through any unfaithfulness of his on account of friendship a mistake in so solemn a matter should be made. It was only when he observed that Ike was beginning to grow uneasy under his somewhat ...
— The Prospector - A Tale of the Crow's Nest Pass • Ralph Connor
... his ordination Butzbach was appointed master of the novices, to superintend their education—which included learning the Psalter by heart—until the time of their profession. He protested his unfitness, but the Abbot held him to it nevertheless. The standard of his pupils was low: many of them, though they came as Bachelors and Masters of Arts from the universities, he judged not so good as boys in the sixth form at Deventer. But he found lecturing ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... Hubert soon managed to turn the conversation to the subject of woman's rights, and the old doctor and the young parson were soon hurling at each other all the staple and now somewhat stale arguments about woman's fitness and woman's unfitness for many things. At last, perhaps because he was ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... nowadays to a great deal of puling over the circumstances in which we are placed. The great refinement of many poetical gentlemen has rendered them practically unfit for the jostling and ugliness of life, and they record their unfitness at considerable length. The bold and awful poetry of Job's complaint produces too many flimsy imitators; for there is always something consolatory in grandeur, but the symphony transposed for the piano becomes hysterically sad. This literature of woe, as Whitman calls ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... fell back on the hope that he might be able to discharge his uncongenial duties for a brief period, and then seek some convenient opportunity of retiring. But as to his own real views of his mistake, and of his unfitness for the post, there never was any doubt, and they found expression when, in the midst of a family gathering, he exclaimed: "Up to this I have been an independent comet, now I ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume II • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... Contrariwise, he said he had at first been so minded himself. His years, his habits, and something of the unfitness of the situation, the remoteness of Bartram-Haugh from good teachers, and all that, had struck him, and nearly determined him against accepting the office. But then came the views which I stated in my letter, and they governed ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... food, the beginning, the middle, and the end, the result of all murderous acts, insolence, insanity, arrogance, pride, patience, policy, impolicy, powerlessness and power, respect, disrespect, decay and stability, humility, charity, fitness of time and unfitness of time, falsehood, wisdom, truth, belief, disbelief, impotence, trade, profit, loss, success, defeat, fierceness, mildness, death, acquisition and non-acquisition, agreement and disagreement, that which should ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... buy. But it was a hopeless attempt. The walls were so high and so dingy, the little pictures were lost upon them; and the vases on the great black mantel-shelf looked so insignificant, I felt ashamed of them, and owned the unfitness of decorating such a room. No flowers would grow in those cold north windows—no bird would sing in sight of such a street. I gave it up with a sigh; and there ...
— Richard Vandermarck • Miriam Coles Harris
... congratulations to Mr. S.? He has my admiration; he is a brave man; when I was young, I should have run away from the sight of you, pierced with the sense of my unfitness. He is more wise and manly. What a good husband he will have to be! And you - what a good wife! Carry your love tenderly. I will never forgive him - or you - it is in both your hands - if the face that once gladdened my heart should be changed into ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... would a considered me pretty fair authority about my own unfitness for the office, but hang me if the citizens of this county positively didn't go to the polls and elect me by about eight hundred majority. I was the worst disappointed of any man you ever saw. I had repeaters around at the polls, too, voting for the Democratic candidate, and I paid ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... was the speech made on the same occasion by Lemuel P. Padgett, chairman of the House Committee on Naval Affairs. It was a disingenuous speech, a speech to lull the country into confidence, a speech which, alone, should have been sufficient to prove Mr. Padgett's unfitness to serve on that committee. Mr. Daniels argued that "Germany's preparedness had not kept Germany out of war"; that seemed enough, but there was one thing he said which utterly dumbfounded me. ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... a great desire to see her son a clergyman, like his father. She did not consider whether his character was fitted for so sacred an office; she rather thought that the profession itself, when once assumed, would purify the character; but, in fact, his fitness or unfitness for holy orders entered little into her mind. She had a respect for the profession, and his father had ...
— The Moorland Cottage • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... little trouble in convincing him that the strong inclination which he felt to bestow her on Julian Peveril, provided he could be brought over to his own political opinions, was a blameable compromise with his more severe principles. Late circumstances had taught him the incapacity and unfitness of Dame Debbitch for the sole charge of so dear a pledge; and he readily and thankfully embraced the kind offer of her maternal uncle, Christian, to place Alice under the protection of a lady of rank in London, whilst he himself was to be ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... feelings towards it are such as would only lead me to speak as it really and truly should be spoken of. There is no country, however fair, that has not some drawback or other. There are no hopes, however promising, that may not be blighted; no prospects, however encouraging, that may not wither. Unfitness for the new field of enterprise on which a man may enter—unpropitious seasons, the designs of others, or unforeseen misfortunes; one or more of these may combine to bring about results very opposite from those we had anticipated. I would not ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... date as her carpet. It had once been delicately blue and gauzy, but its gauziness hung in crushed folds and its blue was almost grey. It was also the dress of a girl, not that of a colourless, worn woman, and her consciousness of its unfitness showed in her small-featured face ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... I loved Thyrza even then with more intensity of pure feeling than I had ever before known, and now I love her with a love which lasts a lifetime. You have no right to pronounce so confidently upon her fitness or unfitness to mate with me; your knowledge of her is very slight. I know her as a woman can only be known by the man who loves her. You cannot judge for me in this case; no one could judge for me. I shall act on my conviction; it is poor waste of ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... separation entered like iron into his soul. Should he ever meet Russell again? What if he had died instead of Edwin, where would he have been? "Oh no! no!" he murmured aloud, as the terrible thought came over him of his own utter unfitness for death, and the possibility that he might never never again hear the beloved accents, or gaze on the cherished ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... evil and the consequents of evil,—with inward prostration of will, mind, and affections I adore thy infinite majesty; I aspire to love thy transcendent goodness!—In a deep sense of my unworthiness, and my unfitness to present myself before thee, of eyes too pure to behold iniquity, and whose light, the beautitude of spirits conformed to thy will, is a consuming fire to all vanity and corruption;—but in the name of the Lord Jesus, of the dear Son ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... of variation from a normal type, sickness in childhood ought to have a certain value not to be classed under any fitness or unfitness of natural selection; and especially scarlet fever affected boys seriously, both physically and in character, though they might through life puzzle themselves to decide whether it had fitted or unfitted them for success; but this ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... remember how the offence happened. I had written that it wanted nothing to render it altogether delightful but a saner religious feeling. This would have been the proper word if any other person had written the book. Feeling its extreme unfitness as soon as it was written, I altered it immediately for the first word which came into my head, intending to remodel the sentence when it should come to me in the proof; and that proof never came. There can be no objection to your printing all that passed upon the occasion, ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... her bewilderment this strange revelation of her own unfitness for association with boys whose mothers took care of them—Jennings, the young footman, ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... so great and clear a proof of unfitness for greater and nobler actions, than a mind which is ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume 1 (of 3), 1837-1843) • Queen Victoria
... always full, while the white regiments have with difficulty been maintained at peace strength. To question the valor of the colored soldier is to betray ignorance of history. This is the first opportunity in his history to prove on an adequate scale his fitness or unfitness for command and leadership. At Fort Des Moines, Iowa, on June 16, 1917, there assembled the largest body of educated Negroes ever brought together for a single purpose. The candidates who survive are men of marked intelligence and ability. Let any man who doubts the colored ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... walked several steps, yet, as it seemed, rather irresolutely, towards the door of the card-room—and then, to the increased surprise of the company, stopped suddenly, and muttering something about the "unfitness of the time," turned on his heel, and bowing haughtily, as there was way made for him, walked in the opposite direction towards the door which ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... of success before deciding to follow it, than that of the actor. And not the least advantage of a dramatic school lies in the fact that some of its pupils may learn to reconsider their determination to go on the stage, become convinced of their own unfitness, recognise in time that they will be wise to abandon a career which must always be hazardous and difficult even to those who are successful, and cruel to those who fail. Let it be something far ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... day and be withdrawn in favor of one whose services to his country were not so invaluable as mine. Appreciating his delicacy I withdrew, but only to be sent out on another job that defies description. Even here I quickly demonstrated my unfitness and have consequently been incorporated once more into the body of ...
— Biltmore Oswald - The Diary of a Hapless Recruit • J. Thorne Smith, Jr.
... thinking about, if not entirely forgotten; the future unembarrassed by problems. Crafts and artifices, common enough a few years ago, are fast passing away. New acquirements are generally saddening proofs of the unfitness of the aboriginal for the battle of life when once his primitive condition is disturbed by the wonder-working whites. Bent wire represents a cheap and effective substitute for fish-hooks of pearl-shell, which cost so much in skill and time, and ever so shabby ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... defensive battle, against greatly superior numbers, could scarcely be expected to stand well. As for the eighty camel men, they were all Soudanese soldiers, discharged from the army for old age and physical unfitness. They could be relied upon to fight but, small in number as they were, could but have little effect on the issue of a battle. All therefore agreed that, having come thus far, the safest, as well as the most honourable ...
— With Kitchener in the Soudan - A Story of Atbara and Omdurman • G. A. Henty
... female are even worse than those upon the male; for, in addition to the exhaustion of nervous energy, she is compelled to endure the burdens and pains of child-bearing when utterly unprepared for such a task, to say nothing of her unfitness for the other duties of a mother. With so many girl-mothers in the land, is it any wonder that there are so many thousands of unfortunate individuals who never seem to get beyond childhood in their development? Many ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... present termination ever since the second century of the Christian aera.(24) In default, therefore, of distinct historical evidence or definite documentary proof that at some earlier period than that it terminated abruptly, nothing short of the utter unfitness of the verses which at present conclude S. Mark's Gospel to be regarded as the work of the Evangelist, would warrant us in assuming that they are the spurious accretion of the post-apostolic age: and as such, at the end of eighteen centuries, to be deliberately ...
— The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark • John Burgon
... be tied up, so as not to be used, it shrinks, and becomes a useless string; if a muscle be condemned to inaction, it shrinks in size and diminishes in power; and thus it is also with the bones. Inactivity produces softness, debility, and unfitness for the functions they are designed ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... I am not of an habitually romantic temperament. I was well aware of my unfitness to deal with a girl who, herself, had never known the processes of lovers, but the belief that she was trying to restrain her true feelings toward me ran through my brain like an intoxicating liquor. I would have taken the breadth of her shoulders ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... classification of verbs depends upon this very matter, whether they have, or have not, an object after them; and no general principle has been, or can be, furnished beforehand, by which their fitness or unfitness for taking such government can be determined. This must depend upon usage, and usage must conform to the sense intended. Very many verbs—probably a vast majority—govern an object sometimes, but not ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... men are found. But they are there for some other reason than that they claim all labor as their sphere. Some are driven by the stern necessity of doing whatever work is at hand; some by ignorance of their unfitness, or of the unfitness of the work for them; some by the spirit of the age which says, "Come, be free. Try these things that men do. See if they ...
— Vocational Guidance for Girls • Marguerite Stockman Dickson
... Prim's wisdom, as Alberto was careful to observe, for King Amadeo was soon convinced of the unfitness of his people for even a constitutional monarchy, told them so, resigned his throne, and bade them farewell. Then came a republic marked by excesses such as even the worst monarch had not committed; among them the dreadful massacre of the members of the filibustering party on the steamer Virginius ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig
... the commencement of a nervous fever which confined me for several months. During all that time Henry was my only nurse. I afterwards learned that, knowing my father's advanced age and unfitness for so long a journey, and how wretched my sickness would make Elizabeth, he spared them this grief by concealing the extent of my disorder. He knew that I could not have a more kind and attentive nurse than himself; and, firm in the hope he felt of my recovery, ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... members of the expedition, may be mentioned Dr. MERK, Dr. ROBECK, the secretary MARTIN SAUER, and the Captains HALL, SARYTCHEV, and BEHRING the younger, in all more than a hundred persons. The expedition was fitted out on a very large scale, but in consequence of Billings' unfitness for having the command of such an expedition the result by no means corresponded to what might reasonably have been expected. The expedition made an inconsiderable excursion into the Polar Sea from the 30th/19th June to the 9th Aug/29th July 1787, and in 1791 Billings sailed ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... for some time subject to attacks of strangury; and having before experienced relief from James's powders, had again recourse to that popular medicine. His medical attendants are said to have remonstrated with him on its unfitness in the stage to which his disorder had reached; but he persevered; and his fever increasing, and some secret distress of mind, under which he owned to Dr. Turton that he laboured, aggravating his bodily complaint, he expired on the 4th of April in ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... man possesses muscles especially formed to enable him to laugh, we have no right to suppose (with some) that laughter is an accident of our fallen nature; or to find (with others) the primary cause of the ridiculous in the perception of unfitness or disharmony. And yet we shrink (whether rightly or wrongly, we can hardly tell) from attributing a sense of the ludicrous to the Creator of these forms. It may be a weakness on my part; at least I will hope it is a reverent one: but till we can find something corresponding ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... who had been listening in silence to a conversation on the engrossing subject of Christmas presents. It was a conversation at once animated and depressing. The time was at hand when none of us could hope to escape these tokens of regard, and the elaborate and ingenious character of their unfitness was frankly and fairly discussed. What baffled us was the theory of choice. Suddenly the old lady flooded this dark problem with light by observing that she always purchased her presents at bazaars. She said she knew they ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... good reasons, also, why this superiority should not much longer continue. Europe is old,—America is young. Land has been cultivated for centuries in Europe, and often by the same family; its capacity tested, its fitness or unfitness for particular crops proved, the local and special effects of different fertilizers well known, and the experience of many generations has been preserved, so as to be equivalent to a like experience, in time and extent, by the present occupants of ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... and highly trained faculty that the race is still developing towards perfection with constant strain and effort—although the planet is far advanced in its decadence and within measurable distance of its unfitness ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... long as they fulfil the conditions laid down in the Instrument of Transfer; that (2) the succession should devolve on the Maharajah's lineal descendant, whether by blood or adoption, except in the case of disqualification through manifest unfitness to rule; and that (3) the Maharajah and his successors shall at all times remain faithful in allegiance and subordination to the British Crown, and perform all the duties which, in virtue of such allegiance ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... claims of being "the highest conception," etc. We think that the strongest point against the dogmas may be found in the claims of their advocates. That the Church is now growing away from them only proves their unfitness as "the highest conception." And Reincarnationists hold that as the Church grows in favor of the Immaterial Immortal Soul, so will it find itself inclining toward the companion-doctrine of Pre-existence and Re-birth, ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... regret, that the course of proceeding under Major-General Butler in this Commonwealth seems to have been designed and adapted simply to afford means to persons of bad character to make money unscrupulously, and to encourage men whose unfitness had excluded them from any appointment by me to the volunteer militia service, to hope for such appointment over Massachusetts troops from other authority than that of ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... body to push forward their cause. Mrs. Humphry Ward and the Anti-Suffragists may be trusted to continue tireless and ever-inventive. Mrs. Ward's League to promote the return of women as town and county councilors is her latest device to prove the unfitness of women for public affairs, and since the Vegetarian League for combating the carnivorous instincts of the tigress by feeding her on blood, there has been no quite so happy adaptation of means to end. If anything could add to the educative efficiency of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... peer in the world. The men are elected by the State legislatures, not by the people at large, a method which makes it easy for an unprincipled millionaire or his political manager to buy votes sufficient to seat his patron. The fact that senators are mainly rich does not imply unfitness, but quite the contrary. Only a genius can become a multi-millionaire in America, and hence the senators are in the main bright men. When observing these men and enabled to look into their records, I was impressed by the fact that, despite the advantages ...
— As A Chinaman Saw Us - Passages from his Letters to a Friend at Home • Anonymous
... of you may say, "The evidence of spiritual verity in me is so small that I am afraid. I feel so far from victory over the flesh that to reach out for a present realization of my hope savors of temerity. Because of my own unfitness for such a spiritual animus my strength is naught and my faith fails." O thou "weak and infirm of purpose." Jesus said, "Be ...
— Pulpit and Press • Mary Baker Eddy
... the people as natural proof of their fitness for representative government in the Western sense, mistake appearances for realities. The truth is that the extraordinary capacity of the Japanese for communal organization, is the strongest possible evidence of their unfitness for any modern democratic form of government. Superficially the difference between Japanese social organization, and local self-government in the modern American, or the English colonial meaning of the term, appears slight; and we may justly admire the perfect self-discipline ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... substituted the fetishism of the Russo-Greek Church. It is the saddest spectacle of our time. Previous emperors, however much they wished to do so, did not dare break their oaths to Finland; but the present weakling sovereign, in his indifference, carelessness, and absolute unfitness to rule, has allowed the dominant reactionary clique about him to accomplish its own good pleasure. I put on record here the prophecy that his dynasty, if not himself, will be punished for it. All history shows that no such crime has gone unpunished. It is a far greater ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... think that his own unfitness for such a communion helped him to his disbelief in its possibility, and from that hour the feeling of his father's nearness weighed more and more ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... returned the arch girl; "for never did I hear a more unworthy conjunction of execution and language than that to which I have been listening; and I was far gone in a learned inquiry into the causes of such an unfitness between sound and sense, when you broke the charm of my musings by that bass ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... to their land, and they hopefully spent their money in hiring American hunters to supply them with game. They seem to have been rather a light-hearted crew, in spite of their misfortunes and sufferings, and they not only amused themselves, but they amused their neighbors by their gay unfitness for the backwoods. If they went to fell a tree, half a dozen of them set to work on it with their axes at once, and when they had chopped it all round, they pulled it down with a rope, to the great danger of their lives and limbs. ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... not much concern ourselves about the form of the pulpit. But sermons cannot always be good; and I believe that the temper in which the congregation set themselves to listen may be in some degree modified by their perception of fitness or unfitness, impressiveness or vulgarity, in the disposition of the place appointed for the speaker,—not to the same degree, but somewhat in the same way, that they may be influenced by his own gestures or expression, irrespective of the sense of what he says. I believe, therefore, ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... anybody else's discomforts as she hurried along the road; she only wished to get to the beloved farm, and to be free there from questions, and from the evidences of her unfitness for the simple duties which life seemed offering her with heartless irony. She was not good for anything after all, it appeared, and she had been cheating herself. This was no life at all, this fretful idleness; if only she had ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... to say of her unfitness, her unworthiness, to occupy the place to which he pointed. Not a doubt, not a fear, had she to express. He loved her, and that she knew; and she had no thought of depreciating his choice, its excellency or its wisdom. Whatever excess of wonder she may have felt was ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... means to keep body and soul together it was easy to forget. Day labor offered only now and then, and in my increasing physical unfitness I could not hold my own against the trained muscles of seasoned roustabouts, porters and freight-handlers. Worse still, the physical deterrent grew by what it fed upon—or by the lack of feeding. Part of the time I couldn't get enough to eat; and there were cold and blustering nights when ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... history, and by means of their heavy seriousness, and the pedantry of their rules, they have so managed matters, that Dulness with leaden sceptre presides over the opera. The deficiencies of their music, the unfitness of the French language for composition in a style anything higher than that of the most simple national melodies, the unaccented and arbitrary nature of their recitative, the bawling bravura of the singers, must be left to the animadversions of ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... the exquisite fitness of Juliet's "Gallop apace, ye fiery-footed steeds," etc., for one of her character, in her circumstances: every one, we trust, and Mr. Smith among the number, will some day feel the exquisite unfitness of using such conceits as we have just quoted, or any other, page after page, for all characters and chances. For the West is not wretched; the rains never were brutal yet, and do not insult the sun's corpse, being some millions of miles nearer us than the sun, but only have happened once ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... to this doctrine. Mrs. Bluestone, with a diligence which was equalled only by her good humour, insisted on the misery which must come upon her young friend should she quarrel with the Countess, and with all the Lovels,—on the unfitness of the tailor, and the impossibility that such a marriage should make a lady happy,—on the sacred duty which Lady Anna's rank imposed upon her to support her order, and on the general blessedness of a well-preserved and exclusive aristocracy. "I don't ...
— Lady Anna • Anthony Trollope
... impair the happiness of God? It may for a time; but Divine Love will win; God will be all in all. Surely it accords with our highest reason to believe that His happiness will not finally be lessened. There is a manifest and eternal unfitness in such a supposition. The Divine Wisdom that rules in all worlds will ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... of heaven suffered violence, and the violent took it by force. The truth simply was, that her time had not come. Physical strength must rule for a time, and she was the weaker. She was very properly refused a feudal grant, by reason, say "Les Coustumes de Normandie," of her unfitness for war or policy: C'est l'homme ki se bast et ki conseille. Other authorities put it still more plainly: "A woman cannot serve the emperor or feudal lord in war, on account of the decorum of her sex; nor assist him with advice, because of her limited intellect; nor keep his ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... as he will be by his secret pangs of conscience, he can scarcely be an active obstructionist. But a man who, having mistaken the field of his life's labor, yet remains amiably self-satisfied, and unconscious of his unfitness, may do more harm in his serene ignorance than he might have done good if he had chosen his proper sphere. Such a man as the last was the Reverend Harold. A good-natured, broad-shouldered, tactless, self-sufficient person, he had taken up his work with a complacent ...
— That Lass O' Lowrie's - 1877 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... walls were papered; the stainless floor was strewn with home-made hooked and braided rugs; and I felt the place so altogether too good for me that I pleaded to stay there for the transaction of my business, lest a sharper sense of my unfitness should await me in ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells |
