capacity quotes

  • His speeches were prepared with that infinite capacity for taking pains, which is said to be genius.

    - Dean Gooderham Acheson
      Of  Winston Churchill. Grapes from Thorns.

  • What varieties man has found out in buildings, attires, husbandry, navigation, sculpture and imagery! What perfection has he shown, in the shows of theatres, in taming, killing, and catching wild beasts! What millions of inventions has he against others, and for himself in poisons, arms, engines, stratagems, and the like! What thousands of medicines for the health, of meats for the throat, of means and figures to persuade, of elegant phrases to delight, of verses for pleasure, of musical inventions and instruments! What excellent inventions are geography, arithmetic, astrology, and therest! How largeis the capacity of man, if we should stand upon particulars!

    -St Augustine originally Aurelius Augustinus
    AD 427  The City of God.

  • The twentieth century had a wonderful capacity for seeing nothing as the sum of everything.

    - Louis Dudek
    Collected in Notebooks1960^1994 (1994).

  • Since his capacity to do is forced into channels of evil through environment and pressures, man is strong before he is moral. The world's anguish is caused by people between twentyand forty.

    -William Harrison Faulkner
      Interview in Paris Review, Spring.

  •    When a felon's not engaged in his employment Or maturing his felonious little plans His capacity for innocent enjoyment Is just as great as any honest man's Ah! When constabulary duty's to be done A policeman's lot is not a happy one.

    - Sir W(illiam) S(chwenck) Gilbert
      Sergeant's song, The Pirates of Penzance, act 2.

  • Most human beings have an infinite capacity for taking things for granted.

    - Aldous Leonard Huxley
      'Variations on a Philosopher'.

Webster's New World Dictionary of Quotations Copyright © 2010 by Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Published by Wiley, Hoboken, NJ. Used by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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