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Infelicity   Listen
noun
Infelicity  n.  (pl. infelicities)  
1.
The state or quality of being infelicitous; unhappiness; misery; wretchedness; misfortune; lack of suitableness or appropriateness. "Whatever is the ignorance and infelicity of the present state, we were made wise and happy."
2.
That (as an act, word, expression, etc.) which is infelicitous; as, infelicities of speech.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Infelicity" Quotes from Famous Books



... it gave it a sense, or an ambiguity, almost foolish—leaving Maggie to feel, as in a flash, how such a consequence, a foredoomed infelicity, partaking of the ridiculous even in one of the cleverest, might be of the very essence of the penalty of wrong-doing. "Oh, you may have had fifty—had the same relation with her fifty times! It's of the number of KINDS of relation with her that I speak—a number ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James

... my lord. For all the eyes we get beyond our own, but minister to infelicity. The microscope disgusts us with our Mardi; and the telescope sets us longing for some ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville

... poor young men who did not know what to do with their afternoons in our arid Belgravian desert. But, a little more is wanted besides five-o'clock tea; and, until it is granted, we will continue to have matrimonial infelicity, marriages "of convenience," and, no ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson

... if you do not. There is no such thing as perfect happiness here, since the busy mind will make to itself evils, were it to find none. You will, therefore, pardon this limited wish, strange as it may appear, till you consider it: for to wish you no infelicity, either within or without you, were to wish you what can never happen in this world; and what perhaps ought not to be wished for, if by a wish one could give one's friend such an exemption; since we are ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson

... however, he would fairly meet the whole question, let him show me that 'hydrophobia,' which he gives as an example of the laws of God and nature, is a calamity to which the poor alone are liable; or that 'malaria,' which, with singular infelicity, he has chosen as an illustration of the fancied evils of population, ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... obscurity of the embrasure. Yes, and a girl whom he had despised! Yesterday he had seriously believed himself to be a celibate for life; he had dismissed for ever the hope of happiness. He had seen naught but a dogged and eternal infelicity. And now he was, if not finding happiness, expecting it. He felt disloyal—less precisely to Marguerite than to a vanished ideal. He felt that he ought to be ashamed. For Marguerite still existed; she was existing at that moment less than ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett

... fame itself has ceased to interest. The reason which ROUSSEAU alleges for the cynical spleen which so frequently breathes forth in his works, shows how the domestic character of the man of genius leaves itself in his productions. After describing the infelicity of his domestic affairs, occasioned by the mother of Theresa, and Theresa herself, both women of the lowest class and the worst dispositions, he adds, on this wretched marriage, "These unexpected disagreeable events, in a state of my own choice, plunged me into literature, to give ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli



Words linked to "Infelicity" :   felicity, infelicitous



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