Capacity for joy admits temptation. [ Mrs. Browning ]
Love, therefore, and tongue-tied simplicity
In least speak most, to my capacity. [ William Shakespeare, Midsummer Night's Dream, Act V. Sc.1 ]
Genius is an immense capacity for taking trouble. [ Carlyle ]
Knowledge is boundless, - human capacity, limited. [ Chamfort ]
Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience. [ Buffon ]
We can only possess wealth according to our capacity. [ John Ruskin ]
Responsibility walks hand in hand with capacity and power. [ Josiah Gilbert Holland (pseudonym Timothy Titcomb) ]
Genius is nothing else than a sovereign capacity for patience. [ Buffon ]
Genius is the transcendent capacity of taking trouble first of all. [ Carlyle ]
The measure of capacity is the measure of sphere to either man or woman. [ Elizabeth Oakes Smith ]
A woman whose ruling passion is not vanity is superior to any man of equal capacity. [ Lavater ]
That one man should die ignorant who had capacity for knowledge, this I call tragedy. [ Carlyle ]
Capacity without education is deplorable, and education without capacity is thrown away. [ Saadi ]
That there should one man die ignorant who had capacity for knowledge, this I call a tragedy. [ Carlyle ]
Were one to ask me in which direction I think man strongest, I should say, his capacity to hate. [ Beecher ]
No human capacity ever yet saw the whole of a thing; but we may see more and more of it the longer we look. [ John Ruskin ]
To how many blockheads of my time has a cold and taciturn demeanor procured the credit of prudence and capacity! [ Montaigne ]
There are few who have at once thought and capacity for action. Thought expands, but lames; action animates, but narrows. [ Goethe ]
Not because of any extraordinary talents did he succeed, but because he had a capacity on a level for business and not above it. [ Tacitus ]
With the possession or certain expectation of good things our demand rises, and increases our capacity for further possession and larger expectations. [ Arthur Schopenhauer ]
To act the part of a true friend requires more conscientious feeling than to fill with credit and complacency any other station or capacity in social life. [ Sarah Ellis ]
When I see the elaborate study and ingenuity displayed by woman in the pursuit of trifles, I feel no doubt of their capacity for the most herculean undertakings. [ Julia Ward Howe ]
Success in business is seldom owing to uncommon talents or original power which is untractable and self-willed, but to the greatest degree of commonplace capacity. [ Hazlitt ]
I look upon paradoxes as the impotent efforts of men who, not having capacity to draw attention and celebrity from good sense, fly to eccentricities to make themselves noted. [ Horace Walpole ]
The capacity of apprehending what is high is very rare; and therefore, in common life a man does well to keep such things for himself, and only to give out so much as is needful to have some advantage against others. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
Ask men of genius how much they owe to their mothers, and you will find that they attribute almost all to them and their influence; and if we could only guage the mental capacity of the wives of great men, we might perhaps learn why genius is so seldom hereditary. [ Lord Kames ]
The only difference between a genius and one of common capacity is that the former anticipates and explores what the latter accidentally hits upon. But even the man of genius himself more frequently employs the advantages that chance presents to him. It is the lapidary that gives value to the diamond, which the peasant has dug up without knowing its worth. [ Abbe Raynal ]
He who expects from a great name in politics, in philosophy, in art, equal greatness in other things, is little versed in human nature. Our strength lies in our weakness. The learned in books are ignorant of the world. He who is ignorant of books is often well acquainted with other things; for life is of the same length in the learned and unlearned; the mind cannot be idle; if it is not taken up with one thing, it attends to another through choice or necessity; and the degree of previous capacity in one class or another is a mere lottery. [ Hazlitt ]
The province of music is rather to express the passions and feelings of the human heart than the actions of men, or the operations of nature. When employed in the former capacity, it becomes an eloquent language; when in the latter, a mere mimic - an imitator, and a very miserable one - or rather a buffoon, caricaturing what it cannot imitate; the idea of the different stages of a battle, or the progress of a tempest being represented to the eye or the ear, or even the imagination, by the quavering of a fiddler's elbow, or the squeaking of catgut, is preposterous. [ G. P. Morris ]
Greatness is not a teachable nor gainable thing, but the expression of the mind of a God-made man: teach, or preach, or labour as you will, everlasting difference is set between one man's capacity and another's; and this God-given supremacy is the priceless thing, always just as rare in the world at one time as another.... And nearly the best thing that men can generally do is to set themselves, not to the attainment, but the discovery of this: learning to know gold, when we see it, from iron-glance, and diamond from flint-sand, being for most of us a more profitable employment than trying to make diamonds of our own charcoal. [ John Ruskin ]