The loveliest hair is nothing, if the wearer is incapable of a grace. [ Leigh Hunt ]
Great eaters and great sleepers are incapable of anything else that is great. [ Henry IV. of France ]
Sentimentally I am disposed to harmony, but organically I am incapable of a tune. [ Lamb ]
Take my word for it, the saddest thing under the sky is a soul incapable of sadness. [ Mme. de Gasparin ]
Those who bestow too much application on trifling things become generally incapable of great ones. [ Rochefoucauld ]
He is incapable of a truly good action who knows not the pleasure in contemplating the good actions of others. [ Lavater ]
No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change. [ John Ruskin ]
He who cannot feel friendship is alike incapable of love. Let a woman beware of the man who owns that he loves no one but herself. [ Talleyrand ]
When a government is arrived to that degree of corruption as to be incapable of reforming itself, it would not lose much by being new moulded. [ Montesquieu ]
Those who are incapable of shining out by dress would do well to consider that the contrast between them and their clothes turns out much to their disadvantage. [ Shenstone ]
Paradise, as described by the theologians, seems to me too musical: I confess that I should be incapable of listening to a cantata that would last ten thousand years. [ T. Gautier ]
Nature understands no jesting; she is always true, always serious, always severe; she is always right, and the errors and faults are always those of man. Him who is incapable of appreciating her she despises, and only to the apt, the pure, and the true, does she resign herself and reveal her secrets. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
Hudibras has defined nonsense, as Cowley does wit, by negatives. Nonsense, he says, is that which is neither true nor false. These two great properties of nonsense, which are always essential to it, give it such a peculiar advantage over all other writings, that it is incapable of being either answered or contradicted. [ Addison ]
Frivolous curiosity about trifles, and laborious attentions to little objects which neither require nor deserve a moment's thought, lower a man, who from thence is thought (and not unjustly) incapable of greater matters. Cardinal de Retz very sagaciously marked out Cardinal Chigi for a little mind, from the moment he told him that he had wrote three years with the same pen, and that it was an excellent good one still. [ Chesterfield ]
The receipt to make a speaker, and an applauded one too, is short and easy. Take commonsense quantum sufficit (in sufficient quantity); add a little application to the rules and orders of the House of Commons, throw obvious thoughts in a new light, and make up the whole with a large quantity of purity, correctness and elegancy of style. Take it for granted that by far the greatest part of mankind neither analyze nor search to the bottom; they are incapable of penetrating deeper than the surface. [ Chesterfield ]