Beyond [Barack Obama] having made history as the first African-American president, I hope that he gets re-elected for what he does while in office, not for his skin color. I certainly believe he has the capacity.
. . . our scholarships should be bestowed on those whose ability and earnestness in the primary department have been proved, and whose capacity for a higher education is fully shown. This is the best work women of wealth can do, and I hope in the future they will endow scholarships for their own sex instead of giving millions of dollars to institutions for boys, as they have done in the past.
I love this word decadence, all shimmering in purple and gold. It suggests the subtle thoughts of ultimate civilization, a high literary culture, a soul capable of intense pleasures. It throws off bursts of fire and the sparkle of precious stones. It is redolent of the rouge of courtesans, the games of the circus, the panting of the gladiators, the spring of wild beasts, the consuming in flames of races exhausted by their capacity for sensation, as the tramp of an invading army sounds.
Human beings seem to have an almost unlimited capacity to deceive themselves, and to deceive themselves into taking their own lies for truth.
Don't ever underestimate the capacity of a human being who is determined to do something.
We need to distinguish between stress and stimulation. Having deadlines, setting goals, and pushing yourself to perform at capacity are stimulating. Stress is when you're anxious, upset, or frustrated, which dramatically reduce your ability to perform.
We need limitations and temptations to open our inner selves, dispel our ignorance, tear off disguises, throw down old idols, and destroy false standards. Only by such rude awakenings can we be led to dwell in a place where we are less cramped, less hindered by the ever-insistent External. Only then do we discover a new capacity and appreciation of goodness and beauty and truth.
All men have the capacity of knowing themselves and acting with moderation.
If I have accomplished anything good, then it's mainly because I've been driven by the need to know whether I can accomplish things I'm not sure I have the capacity for.
I've certainly never helped anybody save the day, in any capacity. If anybody is going to understand making a few mistakes, it's me.
Leo Durocher is a man with an infinite capacity for making a bad thing worse.
The employee is regarded by the employer merely in the light of his value as an operative. His productive capacity alone is taken into account.
I think the most important factor in getting out of the recession actually is just the regenerative capacity of - of American capitalism.
What we need is what the ancient Israelites called hochma - the science of the heart. . . the capacity to see, to feel, and then to act as if the future depended on you. Believe me, it does.
Human societies as temporally and spatially far-flung as the Mesopotamians, Mayans, and Easter Islanders likely came to ruin by expanding beyond the capacity of their environments to sustain them.
What are the conditions of the creative attitude, of seeing and responding, of being aware and being sensitive to what one is aware of? First of all it requires the capacity to be puzzled. Children still have the capacity to be puzzled.
Genius is play, and man's capacity for achieving genius is infinite, and many may achieve genius only through play.
There are also many things my wife can't stand about me, and there are certain capacities that she has that are different than mine. The trick is to find compatibilities.
Empathy is the capacity to think and feel oneself into the inner life of another person.
Novels are routinely denigrated when characters are not found to be likable. Is Raskolnikov likable? Is King Lear? The plethora of such naive readers testifies to a failure of imagination - the capacity to see into unfamiliar lives, motives, feelings - and this failure must, at least in part, be the failure of the teaching of literature in the schools.