Incapacity Quotes
This superficial blurring has something to do with the incapacity I have just mentioned. I can make no statement about reality clearer than my own relationship to reality; and this has a great deal to do with imprecision, uncertainty, transience, incompleteness, or whatever. But this doesn't explain the pictures. At best it explains what led to their being painted.
Gerhard Richter
Of course I constantly despair at my own incapacity, at the impossibility of ever accomplishing anything, of painting a valid, true picture or even knowing what such a thing ought to look like. But then I always have the hope that, if I persevere, it might one day happen. And this hope is nurtured every time something appears, a scattered, partial, initial hint of something which reminds me of what I long for, or which conveys a hint of it – although often enough I have been fooled by a momentary glimpse that then vanishes, leaving behind only the usual thing.
Gerhard Richter
[The Community's] crosses and trials give me confidence. But I derive my hope above all, and most especially, from our utter incapacity, for it is always upon nothingness that God is pleased to rear His works. If at any day we accomplish some good here, the glory will certainly be His alone, since He has employed for this end instruments more capable of spoiling everything than of making it succeed.
Théodore Guérin
Repudiation of the Party principle and of Party discipline - that is what the opposition has arrived at. And this is tantamount to completely disarming the proletariat in the interests of the bourgeoisie It all ads up to that petty-bourgeois diffuseness and instability, that incapacity for sustained effort, unity and organized actions, which, if encouraged, must inevitably destroy any proletarian revolutionary movement.
Vladimir Lenin
From Apollonius, true liberty, and unvariable steadfastness, and not to regard anything at all, though never so little, but right and reason: and always..that it was possible for the same man to be both vehement and remiss: a man not subject to be vexed, and offended with the incapacity of his scholars and auditors in his lectures and expositions.
Marcus Aurelius
Rarely has the incapacity of governments to hold up the course of history been more conclusively demonstrated than in the generation after 1815. To prevent a second French Revolution, or the even worse catastrophe of a general European revolution on the French model, was the supreme object of all the powers which had just spent more than twenty years in defeating the first; even of the British, who were not in sympathy with the reactionary absolutism which re-established themselves all over Europe and knew quite well that reforms neither could nor ought to be avoided, but who feared a new Franco-Jacobin expansion more than any other international contingency. And yet, never in European history and rarely anywhere else has revolutionarism been so endemic, so general, so likely to spread by spontaneous contagion as well as by deliberate propaganda.
Eric Hobsbawm
Woe to him who in passing should hurl an insult at this gentle and pensive head. He would be punished, as all vulgar souls are punished, by his very vulgarity, and by his incapacity to conceive what is divine. This man, from his granite pedestal, will point out to all men the way of blessedness which he found; and ages hence, the cultivated traveler, passing by this spot, will say in his heart, "The truest vision ever had of God came, perhaps, here."
Baruch Spinoza
There can be no question that such a gap existed in early Christian art. What has been praised in it as deliberate simplification, masterly concentration or conscious idealizing and intensifying of the actual is in reality often just incapacity and poverty, just a helpless inability to render natural forms correctly, and a primitive bungling of the drawing.This clumsiness and ungainliness of early Christian art is not mastered until after the Edict of Toleration, when it became the official art of state and court, of aristocratic and educated circles.
Arnold Hauser
