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More "Nothingness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a commonplace of ancient philosophy that the life of the wise man should be a contemplation of, and a preparation for, death. It certainly was so with Marcus Aurelius. The thoughts of the nothingness of man, and of that great sea of oblivion which shall hereafter swallow up all that he is and does, are ever present to his mind; they are thoughts to which he recurs more constantly than any other, and from which he always draws the ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... still flesh-imitating clay. Right in you, right in him, such way be man's! God only makes the live shape at a jet. Will ye renounce this fact of creatureship? The pattern on the Mount subsists no more, Seemed awhile, then returned to nothingness, But copies, Moses strove to make thereby Serve still and are replaced as time requires: By these make newest vessels, reach the type! If ye demur, this judgment on your head, Never to reach the ultimate, angels' law, Indulging every ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... was God this awful time? Nowhere within the ken of the banished youth. In his own feeling Cosmo was outside the city of life—not even among the dogs—outside with bare nothingness—cold negation. Alas for him who had so lately offered to help another to pray, thinking the hour would never come to him when he could not pray! It had COME! He did not try to pray. The thought of prayer did not wake in him! Let no one say he was punished ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... a kiss one day; but soon as she beheld * My hoary hairs, though I my luxuries and wealth display'd; She proudly turned away from me, showed shoulders, cried aloud:— * 'No! no! by Him, whose hest mankind from nothingness hath made For hoary head and grizzled chin I've no especial-love: * What! stuff my mouth with cotton[FN265] ere in sepulchre ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... was taught by Newton, when he solved the problem of the world, and revealed the wonderful art displayed therein by the Supreme Architect. Never before, in the history of the human race, was so impressive a conviction made of the almost absolute nothingness of man, when measured on the inconceivably magnificent scale of the universe. No one, it is well known, felt this conviction more deeply than Newton himself. "I have been but as a child," said he, "playing on the sea-shore; now finding some pebble rather more polished, ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... quite clear of all responsibility for them and theirs, was a flawless heaven with the stellar and planetary universe in it, pitiless and passionless eyes perhaps—as Tennyson calls them—and strange fires; but in this case without power to burn and brand their nothingness into the visitors to St. Sennans, who laughed and talked and smoked and took no notice; and, indeed, rather than otherwise, considered that Orion's Belt and Aldebaran had been put there to make it a fine night for them to laugh and talk and ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... innocence and peace, irradiating the atmosphere around her. It is true the thought occurred to Ben, vaguely, that through harm to her he might inflict the greatest punishment upon her father; but the idea came like a dark shape that faded away and vanished into nothingness as soon as it came within the nimbus that ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... matter; and something belonging to movement, if under movement we include operation. And things need governing as to both: because even that which is stable, since it is created from nothing, would return to nothingness were it not sustained by a governing hand, as will be explained later ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... confronted many problems as the years had passed. He had seen men like himself die, leaving behind them the force they had controlled, and he had seen this force—controlled no longer—let loose upon the world, sometimes a power of evil, sometimes scattering itself aimlessly into nothingness and folly, which wrought harm. He was not an ambitious man, but—perhaps because he was not only a man of thought, but a Vanderpoel of the blood of the first Reuben—these were things he did not contemplate without restlessness. When Rosy had gone away and seemed lost to them, he ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... is observed that effects share the nature of what they originate from. Pitchers and ornaments, e.g. which are produced from clay and gold respectively, possess the nature of their causal substances. But you hold yourself that the world is not seen to be of the nature of nothingness; and certainly it is not observed to be so.—Again, if that which is underwent absolute destruction, it would follow that after one moment the entire world would pass away into nothingness; and subsequently the world again originating from nothingness, ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... one another's grief? And, when we do, by what standard can we measure it? More especially is comprehension rare, if we chance to be the original cause of the trouble. Do we think of the feelings of the beetles it is our painful duty to crush into nothingness? Not at all. If we have any compunctions, they are quickly absorbed in the pride of our capture. And more often still, as in the present case, we set our foot upon the poor victim by pure accident or ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... seemed to summer-time in Angela's thoughts! What a long gulf of nothingness to be bridged over, what a dull level plain to cross, before June and the roses could come round again, bringing with them the memory of last summer; and the days she had lived under the same roof with Fareham, and the evenings when they had sat in the same room, or loitered ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... for the one great war-defence Left us, since Aeacus' son in battle fell, Was Aias' mighty strength. And now the Gods Will to our loss destroy him, bringing bane On thee and me, that all we may fill up The cup of doom, and pass to nothingness." ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... first rush of a thousand happy, grateful, delicious sentiments of an overflowing heart, to hear that he loved another; to be commissioned to that other, the messenger, the minister; to feel all at once that utter nothingness which she was—which she ever must be, but which, till then, her young mind had not taught her—that utter nothingness to him who was all to her; what wonder that, in her wild and passionate soul, all the elements jarred ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... Hugo spoke, finishing with the words: "No, it is not the Unknown to him. I have said this before, and I shall never tire of repeating it: it is not darkness to him, it is Light! It is not the end, but the beginning; not nothingness, but eternity! Is not this the truth, I ask you who listen to me? Such coffins proclaim immortality. In the presence of certain illustrious dead, we understand the divine destiny of that intellect which has traversed earth to suffer and ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness. I did not know that I knew aught, or that I lived or acted or desired. I had neither will nor intellect. I was carried along to objects and acts by a certain blind natural impetus. I had a mind which caused me to feel anger, satisfaction, desire. These two facts led those about ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... them. It would not have been well if they had been. The business of human creatures in this planet is not summed up in the most excellent of priestly catechisms. The world and its concerns continued to interest men, though priests insisted on their nothingness. They could not prevent kings from quarrelling with each other. They could not hinder disputed successions, and civil feuds, and wars, and political conspiracies. What they did do was to shelter the weak from the strong. In the eyes of the clergy, the serf and his lord stood on the common level of ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... the instrument and resumed his blank stare into nothingness. Frederik was once more wholly engrossed in the book he was not reading. Hartmann broke in upon the ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... too wise to appear to avoid Courtenay. Indeed, she was studiously agreeable to him when they met. She adopted the safe role of good-fellowship, flattering herself that her own folly would shrink to nothingness under the hourly castigation thus inflicted. During this period, Mr. Boyle's changeable characteristics puzzled and amused her. As he grew stronger, and took part in the active life of the ship, so did his sudden excess of talkativeness disappear. Once she happened ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... as careful and as wasteful of time as ever. But when he enunciated his famous "pool!" the stranger was treated to a surprise. The first ball was literally snuffed into nothingness before it had risen five feet above the trap! Then quite slowly Mr. Kincaid followed the second to the top of its flight and broke it as though it had ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... that conceptions like these are calculated rather to depress than to elevate us in the scale of being; that, banished as he is by these contemplations to a corner of creation, and there reduced to an atom, man sinks to nothingness in this infinity of worlds. But a second thought corrects the impression. These vast contemplations are well calculated to inspire awe, but not abasement. Mind and matter are incommensurable. An immortal ...
— The Uses of Astronomy - An Oration Delivered at Albany on the 28th of July, 1856 • Edward Everett
... stars! 'tis well, Were thy last hour to come, This moment had been it; [1] yet by thy shroud I'll pull thee backward, squeeze thee to a bladder, Till thou dost groan thy nothingness away. Thou fly'st! 'Tis well. [Ghost retires. [2] I thought what was the courage of a ghost! Yet, dare not, on thy life—Why say I that, Since life thou hast not?—Dare not walk again Within these walls, on pain of the Red Sea. For, if henceforth I ever find thee here, As sure, sure ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... happened as all such great controversies have ever closed. "Who now-a-days takes those Standard Rules, either one or the other, for their guide in writing?" This is the finest lesson ever offered to the furious heads of parties, and to all their men; let them meditate on the nothingness of their "Standard Rules," by the fate ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... the mire of self-forgetfulness... of self-contempt,—calmly to turn away from all, to say 'enough!' and folding impotent arms upon the empty breast, to save the last, the sole honour he can attain to, the dignity of knowing his own nothingness; that dignity at which Pascal hints when calling man a thinking reed he says that if the whole universe crushed him, he, that reed, would be higher than the universe, because he would know it was crushing him, and it would know it not. A poor dignity! A sorry consolation! Try ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... and again, as having "outvillained villainy so far, that the rarity redeems him." And he is at last felt to be worth feeding and keeping alive for the simple reason of his being such a miracle of bespangled, voluble, impudent good-for-nothingness, that contempt and laughter cannot afford to let him die. But the roundest and happiest delivery of him comes from the somewhat waggish but high-spirited and sharpsighted Lord Lafeu, who finds him "my good window of lattice," and one whose "soul is in his clothes"; ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... He seemed hung in nothingness, an utter emptiness where nothing moved; only the ghostly whirls of light that ran lazily away from his beating hands until they died silently away into darkness, swallowed up in this unspeakable horror of soundless ...
— The Finding of Haldgren • Charles Willard Diffin
... as he now opened this window, to face gray sweetly-scented nothingness. But in the window glass, you saw, the appearance of his flourishing gardens remained unchanged: and in the half of the window to the right hand were quivering poplars, and Niafer and little Melicent were ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... wert thou nothingness? What is there that I fear to say? And yet, what help?... Ah, well-a-day, This ache ...
— The Trojan women of Euripides • Euripides
... conventional morality; but even then her blood flowed as quietly as ever in her fascinatingly graceful, tranquil body. Sometimes coming out of her fragrant bath all warm and enervated, she would fall to musing on the nothingness of life, the sorrow, the labour, the malice of it.... Her soul would be filled with sudden daring, and would flow with generous ardour, but a draught would blow from a half-closed window, and Anna Sergyevna would shrink into herself, and feel plaintive and almost angry, and there was only one ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... the complete silence outside. The well padded suit encompassed him so gently there was no sense of pressure on his body to make up for the weightlessness. Johnny felt as though he were bodiless, a naked brain with eyes only hanging in nothingness. ...
— Far from Home • J.A. Taylor
... a legend!" and the Princess smiled, turning her dark eyes with a bewitching languor on Gervase, who, for some reason or other which he could not explain, felt as if he were walking in a dream on the edge of a deep chasm of nothingness, into which he must presently sink to utter destruction. "All these old histories happened so long ago that they are nothing but myths ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... and are forgotten, who once inhabited this part of the country; such as the Mawsh-ko-desh, Urons, Ossaw-gees—who formerly occupied Saw-gi-naw bay; and the Odaw gaw-mees, whose principal habitation was about the vicinity of Detroit River. They are entirely vanished into nothingness. Not a single page of their history can be found on record in the history of this country, or hardly an allusion to their existence. My own race, once a very numerous, powerful and warlike tribe of Indians, who ...
— History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan • Andrew J. Blackbird
... free-will when examined by the natural reason—a thing that melts away inevitably first to haze, and then to utter nothingness. And for a time we feel convinced that it really is nothing. Let us, however, again retire from it to the common distance, and the phantom we thought exorcised is again back in an instant. There is the sphinx once more, distinct and clear as ever, holding in its hand the scales of good ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... blankly. "The Naipor? Gone?" It seemed as if the world had dropped away from his feet, leaving him to fall endlessly through nothingness. It was true, of course. It didn't take more than twenty-four hours to unload the ship's holds, and, since there had been no intention of reloading, there was no need to stay. He had long ...
— But, I Don't Think • Gordon Randall Garrett
... ['s][u]nyabindu, generally shortened to ['s][u]nya (the void). Brockhaus[146] has well said that if there was any invention for which the Hindus, by all their philosophy and religion, were well fitted, it was the invention of a symbol for zero. This making of nothingness the crux of a tremendous achievement was a step in complete harmony with the genius of ...
— The Hindu-Arabic Numerals • David Eugene Smith
... Her voice trailed into nothingness as she disappeared into the kitchen. When she emerged again she was still enumerating the charms of the absurdly low-priced Chicago ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber
... glad accord, Obedient to the high behest, To worship with their fragrant breath Around the altars of the Lord; And some, from nothingness and death, Pass to the heaven ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... have the proofs, general, to-day—at once, provided that we thoroughly understand each other. I am ambitious, general, and I have no wish to be driven back for a single day into nothingness, as I should be, if my enemies withdraw their confidence in me. Now I am, at least, a member of the senate; but if the senate is dissolved, and I should subsequently be deposed again from the ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... intrigue, bargaining, and begging, she had seated him at last in the Academie, she felt herself possessed by a certain veneration, forgetting that it was herself who had clothed him in that coat with the green palm leaves, in which his nothingness ceased to ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... woods—woods that so lately resounded with laughter—laughter ringing like a bell—the music of a merry heart. Withdraw those curtains which hide the heart-struck and the dead. Above you is the exquisite picture of Eleanora, gazing into the very bed at that form which lay shrouded in nothingness. You see the broad manly brow—even now the brown hair rises in graceful curls over that damp forehead. The lips are locked in an eternal smile, as if to mock the closed eyes and the recumbent form. Is it true that pictures of those we love are endowed with a clairvoyant ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... hell, has Italy become? And thy sweet cords Still trembled at the touch of thy right hand, Unhappy bard of love. Alas, Italian song is still the child Of sorrow born. And yet, less hard to bear, Consuming grief than dull vacuity! O blessed thou, whose life was one lament! Disgust and nothingness are still our doom, And by our cradle sit, and on ...
— The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi • Giacomo Leopardi
... school, you know, Julia, boys care nothing for a lord. A good cricketer, an excellent fellow, is worth all the earls in the peerage. But at college all that ceases; bats and balls sink into the nothingness in which corals and bells had sunk before. One grows manly, and worships coronets and carriages. I saw it was a fine thing to get a prize, but it was ten times a finer thing to get drunk with a peer. So, when I had done the first, ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... towards no happy goal for him or Mamma, or us, but at last towards hardly any goal at all for anybody! So mad did the affair grow;—and is so madly recorded in those inextricable, dateless, chaotic Books. We have now come to regions of Narrative, which seem to consist of murky Nothingness put on boil; not land, or water, or air, or fire, but a tumultuously whirling commixture of all the four;—of immense extent too. Which must be got crossed, in some human manner. ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... waltz came to an end, its last notes trailing off into nothingness and blowing away like a handful of leaves on a breeze. The kaleidoscopic patterns sorted themselves and turned into a circle of perambulating couples, and Gay and her partner passed the two men ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... of the water which is pushed back by the contained air. Just as such bubbles are not water, but are precisely the spots from which water is absent, so these units are not koilon, but the absence of koilon—the only spots where it is not—specks of nothingness floating in it, so to speak, for the interior of these space-bubbles is an absolute void to the highest power of vision that we can ...
— Occult Chemistry - Clairvoyant Observations on the Chemical Elements • Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater
... the air to meet him. But, alas! exaltation of feeling lasts only a moment; it drops us where it finds us. If it were not so, how easy to be a hero! The dull reaction of the present, like a slow avalanche, crushed and ground me into nothingness. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... and as Aquileia. Yet another march of thirty-two miles brought the squalid invaders to Patavium, proud of its imagined Trojan origin, and, with better reason, proud of having given birth to Livy. Patavium, too, was levelled with the ground. True, it has not like its sister towns remained in the nothingness to which Attila reduced it. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... as night, floated over Walter's reeling brain; darkness, pierced by a thousand gleaming, twinkling lights, brilliant as stars, then came a void and nothingness. Slowly at last he felt himself struggling up out of the void, battling, fighting for consciousness, then came a delicious sort of languor. If this was dying, it was very pleasant. Forms seemed to be flitting ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... fairy-like in the picture one sees at night from the Green below. Dozens of lighted windows gleam softly through the foliage, for all the world like witches' lamps. The day reveals thin, blue plumes of smoke stealing out of the tops of the trees to be wafted off into nothingness; they come from invisible chimneys far down in the leafy fastnesses. Up here are the huts of the newly married. Almost without exception, they are tiny affairs, scarcely larger than the metaphorical ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... Wolsey's political ideas. In the summer of 1528 the attacks of the allies on Naples were repulsed, and their armies annihilated. In the spring of 1529 the Emperor got the upper hand in Lombardy also. How utterly then did the oft-proposed plan, of depriving him of the supreme dignity, sink into nothingness: he was stronger than ever in Italy. The Pope was fortunate in not having joined the allies more closely; the relations of the States of the Church with Tuscany made a union with the Emperor necessary; he had a horror of a new quarrel with him. And as the ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... came knocking the thought that perhaps he did not care for her, and had deceived her to gain her favors. Then she flushed with anger and swore to herself she hated him, and hoped never to see his face again. And the castle faded and was wafted away to the realms of airy nothingness. ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... the mitigating hour that softens the heart made his spirit brave. Amid the ennobling sympathies of nature, the pursuits and purposes of worldly prudence and conventional advantage subsided into their essential nothingness. He willed to blend his life and fate with a being beautiful as that nature that subdued him, and he felt in his own breast the intrinsic energies that in spite of all obstacles should mould such an imagination ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... the gods pales into nothingness when compared with a toddy such as I make," said he. "Ambrosia may have been all right for the degenerates of the old Grecian and Roman days, but an American gentleman demands a toddy—a hot toddy." And then he proceeded with circumspection and dignity ...
— The Fifth String, The Conspirators • John Philip Sousa
... Swirling nothingness, a dry cachination as of some dead-as-dust thing laughing at life itself, a shuddering vibrance flooding through my flesh in waves of terrible nausea, a dim glow that grew and grew into terrifying ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... Mere Malheur, announcing that her place of concealment was to be searched by the Governor, excited her liveliest apprehensions. But that faded into nothingness in comparison with the absolute terror that seized her at the thoughts of the speedy arrival of her ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... shows how uneducated your eyes are, and how much they have to learn. I'm not very clever over such things, being best when I get scent of a buried temple, tomb, or city. But this waste of nothingness contains plenty to interest an observer, and I can help you a little if you will try to make the ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... spiritually mighty, yet so proudly, so austerely sad, that Harris felt as he stared, that the sight was more than his eyes could meet, and that in another moment the power of vision would fail him altogether, and he must sink into utter nothingness. ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... you—about the eyes," Mrs Macmichel said. She gave the photograph hurriedly back. She could not endure to look upon the eyes closed now upon their "first dark day of nothingness." ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... bright yellow eyes had faded to nothingness in the sunlight. "Gave you its health," said the man of Van Daamas respectfully as he broke ...
— Bolden's Pets • F. L. Wallace
... the latter said, "All Englishmen are ridiculous; and you are a good specimen of the race. Why should you stop on the public highway and talk nothingness ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... By-and-By." No; he whistled not at all, or, when he did, gay bits of jazz heard at the theatre or in a restaurant the night before. He deceived no one, least of all himself. Sometimes his voice would trail off into nothingness, but he would catch the tune and toss it up again, heavily, as though ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... Tuileries. But as an Austrian commander, he must wait for the opinion of men too far off to know a single fact of the campaign, too blind to know them if they were on the spot, and too jealous even of their own general to suffer him to beat the enemy if victory would throw their own nothingness into the shade." ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... force the Psalmist could not feel: "When I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars which Thou hast ordained; what is man that Thou are mindful of him? and the son of man that Thou visitest him?" The infinity of God, the nothingness of man: the poor brain reels before the contrast. Is it thinkable, we ask, that He whose dwelling-place is eternity should care for us even as we care for our children? So the question is often urged upon us to-day. But arguments of this kind, it ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... thing of beauty is a joy forever; Its loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness; but still will keep A bower quiet for us; and a sleep Full of sweet dreams, and health, and ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... him, made Dudley Stackpole as one set over and put apart from his fellows. Neither by daytime nor by nighttime was he thereafter to know darkness. Never again was he to see the twilight fall or face the blackness which comes before the dawning or take his rest in the cloaking, kindly void and nothingness of the midnight. Before the dusk of evening came, in midafternoon sometimes, of stormy and briefened winter days, or in the full radiance of the sun's sinking in the summertime, he was within doors lighting the lights which would keep the darkness ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... those whom he persecutes He is not intelligent enough to doubt He studied until the last moment Her husband had become quite bearable His habit of pleasing had prolonged his youth I feel in them (churches) the grandeur of nothingness I gave myself to him because he loved me I haven't a taste, I have tastes It was too late: she did not wish to win Knew that life is not worth so much anxiety nor so much hope Laughing in every wrinkle of his face Learn to live without desire Life as a ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... bright day, Jim landed at a little way station from which a single-gauge track ran off into apparent nothingness. Puffing on the single-gauge track was a "dinky" engine, coupled to a flat car. Wooden benches were fastened along one end of the car. The engineer and fireman were loading sheet iron on the other end. They looked Jim ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... disciples, agents, and fanatics in every class of society which has had, and often has still, the ear of kings and nobles—which, in a word, can raise its creatures to the highest positions, and with a word can reduce them again to the nothingness from which ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... neither will pass into nothingness, since neither came therefrom; and therefore every part of me, though changed in form, will continue to be a part of the Universe, and that part will change into another part, and so on through all the ages. And therefore, through such changes I myself exist; and, in like manner, those who ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... for a little while, by those who envied his greatness, resented his leadership, and sought to shake him from his lofty place. But he stood serene and imperturbable, while that denial, like many another blast of evil-scented wind, passed into nothingness, even before the disappearance of the party strife out of whose fermentation it had arisen. By the unanimous judgment of his countrymen for two generations after his death he was hailed as Pater Patriae; and the age which ...
— The Americanism of Washington • Henry Van Dyke
... Bethlehem. Had these shepherds not followed up the message their knowledge of their Messiah would have immediately been cut short. We hear divine messages and see heavenly visions enough, but too often we let them fade into forgetfulness and pass into nothingness. A message does us no good until it becomes action, the grandest vision that ever swept through our brain or illuminated our sky leaves no vestige of worth unless it is turned into conduct and ...
— A Wonderful Night; An Interpretation Of Christmas • James H. Snowden
... of friendly intercourse when it seemed we talked nothings and wandered and meandered among subjects, but always we had our eyes on one another. And afterwards I would spend long hours in recalling and analyzing those nothings, questioning their nothingness, making out of things too submerged and impalpable for the rough drags of recollection, promises and indications. I would invent ingenious things to say, things pushing out suddenly from nothingness to extreme significance. I rehearsed a ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... fortune and no future to offer you," said Josephine. "What he is, he is only through the friendship of Bonaparte. He has no estate, no importance, no celebrity. Were Bonaparte to abandon him he would fall back into nothingness and ...
— Queen Hortense - A Life Picture of the Napoleonic Era • L. Muhlbach
... glorious foliage drooped their branches, and dipped the ends in the glancing water. The bright sun shone overhead; the tendrils and waving grass were gay with blossoms; birds of lovely plumage sang sweetly; and in the distance, on the one hand, fading away into nothingness, were the glorious blue mountains, and away to ...
— The Adventures of Don Lavington - Nolens Volens • George Manville Fenn
... all," he continued, "the question is not whether they are intelligent or narrow, it is not my business to take the priest to pieces to discover under the consecrated rind the nothingness of the man; not my business to abuse his inadequacy since it is thoroughly suited to the understanding of the crowd. Would it not be, after all, more courageous and more humble to kneel before a being of whose brains ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... "benedictions." Next best to being with Christ Himself, I love to be with those who have His spirit and are yearning for more of His likeness. You speak of putting "deep and dark chasms between" yourself and Christ. He lets us do this that we may learn our nothingness, our weakness, and turn, disgusted, from ourselves to Him. May I venture to assure you that the "chasms" occur less and less frequently as one presses on, till finally they turn into "mountains of light." Get and keep a will for ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... alike seemed to vanish as their hurtling flight sent them rocketing on for distances inconceivably vast through a bleak and appalling Nothingness, where ...
— Zehru of Xollar • Hal K. Wells
... la chasse alone, and horses, and dogs, with each day no higher aim than its own mean pleasure. Ah, Paul!" she continued with sudden passion, "I would rather you were dead—dead and cold with me, than I should have to feel you were growing a rien du tout—a thing who will go down into nothingness, and ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn
... PETER came (That was the kindly Bishop's name), He heard these dreadful oaths with shame, And chid their want of dress. (Except a shell—a bangle rare— A feather here—a feather there The South Pacific Negroes wear Their native nothingness.) ...
— More Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... woman could see. Oh, how white and cold and still the distant mountains shone in the pallid light! Oh, how silent, peaceful, deserted, the far-away slopes and ridges over the prairie! Oh, how faint and far and glimmering were the night lights of the stars, dimmed into nothingness by the broad, brilliant, overwhelming radiance of the Queen of Heaven! Oh, how sweet, luring, love-lighting were those witching waltz strains floating out upon the breathless air! Oh, how warm and close was the pressure of his strong ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... themselves the primeval, or timeless, Something?—"What was the veiling cover of everything?"—they themselves ask. And they answer with another question—"Was it the water's deep abyss?" They think of it as "an ocean without light." "Then (say they) from the nothingness enveloped in empty gloom, Desire (Love) arose, which was the first germ of mind. This loving impulse the Sages, seeking in their heart, recognised as the bond between Being and Non-Being." How deep the plunge here into the sphere of abstract thought! Yet so subtle and forceful had been the mystic ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... conceit that misleads you!" said Ak, sternly. "You are a transient race, passing from life into nothingness. We, who live forever, pity but despise you. On earth you are scorned by all, and in Heaven you have no place! Even the mortals, after their earth life, enter another existence for all time, and so are your ...
— The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus • L. Frank Baum
... from her inner consciousness' was a bad headache after it was all over. It dawned upon her gradually that the world was being picked to pieces, and put together on new and, according to the talkers, on infinitely better principles than before, that religion was in a fair way to be reasoned into nothingness, and intellect was to be the only God. Jo knew nothing about philosophy or metaphysics of any sort, but a curious excitement, half pleasurable, half painful, came over her as she listened with a sense of being turned adrift into time and ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... sum of human life. Must I believe, must you believe, that all this fair scene is to end forever at death? That you, bound to each other by so many ties, are to be separated, and both of you to be divided from Zenobia, and all of us to fall into nothingness, silence, and darkness? Rather than that, would that the life we now enjoy might be immortal! Here are beautiful objects, among which one might be willing to live forever. I am never weary of the moon and her soft light, nor of the ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... together in the open doorway of the little house and watched the yacht's lights as they described a great curve through the darkness, then slowly faded into nothingness down the bay. Cherry drew herself closer ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... see that ignorance is the means of our intellectual pleasure? It is the solving of the problem that brings enjoyment—the solved problem has no further interest. So when all is known, the stimulus for action ceases; when all is known there is quiescence, nothingness. Perfect knowledge implies the peace of death, implies the state of being one—our pleasures are derived from action, from differences, ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... thee more of the wonders of these tombs that are my palace halls? If thou wilt, I can lead thee to where Tisno, the mightiest and most valorous King of Kor, in whose day these caves were ended, lies in a pomp that seems to mock at nothingness, and bid the empty shadows of the past do ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... Harry; and they say the poor thing can preach; forgive me what I have done to him, oh Lord! It is the weakness of man grasping the things of this world, to leave behind for the world's nothingness," says Mr. M'Fadden, as the woman leaves the room ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... window again and faced me, and her eyes were glowing with the light of love. Again for the moment we were face to face with the perils that menaced us from the outside, and before that consideration, all else faded to nothingness with Zara. A little while ago she had repudiated me, but all-conquering Love had stepped in again, had overpowered her, enthralled her, and I could see that she was more than ...
— Princess Zara • Ross Beeckman
... a great crisis has probably shared the old nurse's surprise at finding that smaller troubles, which for a while were reduced to nothingness, soon revive with our own ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... brain-mind evidence—grammar, microscopic examination of text and forms and so on—that Homer is a mere airy myth; but to do so you must be totally oblivious of the spiritual facts of style and poetry. Take these into account, and he rises with wonderful individuality from the grave and nothingness into which you have relegated him. The Illiad does not read like a single poem; there are incompatibilities between its parts. On the other hand, there is, generally speaking, the impress of a single creative genius. One master made the Homeric style. The Iliad, as ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... an affirmative force which does not belong to it. Consider what is meant by the negative. It is the absence of something. It is not-being, and is the absence of all that constitutes being. Left to itself, it remains in its own nothingness, and it only assumes form and activity when we give these to it by ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... several seconds before he could bring it into play upon the great thing that shook and tossed him about as though he had been a rat in the mouth of a terrier. But suddenly there was the sharp report of a firearm, and another of Professor Maxon's unhappy experiments sank back into the nothingness from which he ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... that observed in the same latitudes seven years previously. The narrow ribbon of light, contracting towards the sun, and running outward from it to a distance of thirty-five degrees; the unsubstantial head—a veiled nothingness, as it appeared, since no distinct nucleus could be made out; the quick fading into invisibility, were all accordant peculiarities, and they were confirmed by some rough calculations of its orbit, ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... who escaped at the former place tells a wonderful story of the strangeness of its coiling flow, and how he looked down from the church spire and saw the houses of the village rising like ghosts out of its inky nothingness. For a day and a half he remained there, weary, starving and sun-scorched, the earth under the blue sky and against the prospect of the distant hills a velvet-black expanse, with red roofs, green trees, and, later, black-veiled shrubs and gates, barns, outhouses, ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... winter—we can recommence operations with the Artesian ray; that is, if we think well to do so. You should stop this and take up something else. You have several enterprises which are very important and ought to be carried on. Take up one of them, and think no more for a few months of the nothingness which ...
— The Great Stone of Sardis • Frank R. Stockton
... like a statue, gazing into nothingness. Then she paced to and fro, her hands clenched on her breast. This was a secluded nook, where a bench had been built between two low-branching trees, on the bank of the stream. Pan stealthily slipped closer, so he could get clearer ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... stay saved—is hastening rapidly on to the tomb of the world's history, will pass in turn through that gloomy sepulcher of countless nations into the great inane, the eternal void, the all-embracing night of utter nothingness! With all our patriotism and scannel-piping, our boasting and our battlefields, our solemn Declarations and labored Constitutions, we are but ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... day before Christmas, Jane took up to Ray's room one of her trifles, a whip, whose suave and frothy nothingness was piled over the sweet plum-pulp at bottom. Ray lay on the outside of the bed, with his thick poncho over him; he looked at her and at her tray, played with the teaspoon a moment, then rolled upon his side and shut his eyes. Little Jane took a half-dozen steps about the room, reached ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... was more or less like a man: that is to say, he was an idiot. The importance of all other things dwindled into nothingness. His habits, which were as fixed as the stars at other times, took a complete vacation. He even forgot hunger, and the whistlers and gophers were quite safe. He was tireless. He rambled during the night as well as the day in ...
— The Grizzly King • James Oliver Curwood
... down on a prayer stool, left.] She flees from me, as I flee from my bad thoughts! Alone, forsaken—what more is there for me in life? Naught have I learned of life save its nothingness, and no wishes are left to me but evil ones. My soul would be like an empty shell were it not filled with her! My life—Ah, what has it been? [Pall pounds on floor.] What was that?—Ghosts in the ...
— Lucky Pehr • August Strindberg
... minutes, and he saw that, while Tayoga was unconscious, the flow of blood was still held in check by the bandages. Resuming his burden, he went on through the forest, a full quarter of a mile now, and the last sound of the battle sank into nothingness behind him. He was consumed with anxiety to know who had won, but there was ...
— The Rulers of the Lakes - A Story of George and Champlain • Joseph A. Altsheler
... kinds of love—one with strong wings which lift the soul to a dazzling perfection of immortal destiny,—the other with gross and heavy chains which fetter every hope and aspiration and drag the finest intelligence down to dark waste and nothingness. ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... nose beyond the shadowy yacht because he knew that he must allow for the current. Her eyes devoured him, and her heart sang. Plup-plup-plup-plup said the water. The oars plashed gently. Jenny saw the blackness gliding beside her, thick and swift. They might go down, down, down in that black nothingness, and nobody would know of it.... The oars ground against the edge of the dinghy—wood against wood, grumbling and echoing upon the water. Behind everything she heard the roaring of London, and was aware of lights, moving and ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... mental faculty was instantly concentrated upon the single sense of hearing. My conductor had left me. There was the sound of a closing door and of padded foot-falls that trailed off into nothingness; then silence. ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... a burdensome night. The prince turned on his bed repeatedly, and asked himself whether he had not been blind, and if he had not received sight that day for the first time in order to convince himself of his folly and nothingness. How differently during those night hours did the warnings of his mother appear to him, and the restraint of his father in enouncing the supreme will, and even the stern conduct ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... greatness. That a few defaced, dismantled, moss-grown or sand-choked fragments of these mighty buildings would one day be the only trace, the sole memorial of a rule and of nations that would then have past away forever, even into nothingness and oblivion, scarcely was anticipated by the haughty conquerors who filled those halls with their despotic presence, and entered those consecrated gates in the pomp of triumph to render thanks for bloody victories and warlike exploits which elated their souls in pride till they felt ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... passed—it throbbed itself away; the spiritual gusts of thought grew continually fainter, till, like the echoes of a dying harp, like the breath of a falling gale, they slowly sank to nothingness. Then wearied with an extreme of wild emotion Beatrice sought her bed again and presently ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... out and closed the door, and it must be confessed that Miss Minchin stood for a few moments and glared at it. What he had said was quite true. She knew it. She had absolutely no redress. Her show pupil had melted into nothingness, leaving only a friendless, beggared little girl. Such money as she herself had advanced was lost and ...
— A Little Princess • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... name of the Void, the Void would answer. He feared it—it meant that She would be swallowed also in the great gaping hollow of nothingness. He strained his ears for sounds of the living world—the spit of the fire, the fall of clinkers in the grate, the whisper of the wind stirring at the door. He tried to analyse his growing uneasiness. He was sure now that she had followed Antoine's ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... original projectors of these institutions that we gazed on the soul-exciting scene before us. We thought of the enchantments related in the Arabian Nights' Entertainments, and they faded away into nothingness compared with what ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... with it. There was a certain relief in facing the worst; yet he could not always face it. There was the trouble. Now and then a hope, which he told himself was futile, would spring unbidden to his heart, establish itself as a radiant guest. Yet presently it would depart, mocking him; or fade into nothingness leaving a blank ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... we have supposed, the man possessed real goodness; but it was largely goodness in the germ; it needed to be developed. It is only congenial with what we know of divine operations to believe that what is good will be developed, rather than that it will decay into nothingness. From that point of view a preliminary stage of progress seems ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... sustain the shock of considerable hazard with spirit and fortitude. But, in London, the feeling of self-importance is totally lost and suppressed in the bosom of a stranger. A painful conviction of insignificance—of nothingness, I may say—is sunk upon his heart, and murmured in his ear by the million, who divide with him that consequence which he unconsciously before supposed he possessed in a general estimate of the world. ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt
... brevity in verse 15. 'They followed vanity, and became vain.' The worshipper became like the thing worshipped, as is always the case. The idol is vanity, utter emptiness and nonentity; and whoever worships nothingness will become in his own inmost life as empty and vain as it is. That is the retribution attendant on all trust in, and longing after, the trifles of earth, that we come down to the level of what we set our hearts upon. We see the effects of that principle in the moral degradation of idolaters. Gods ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... that he could neither be mistaken nor deceived, that he saw everything, that he accomplished everything, and the illusions with which he was surrounded in regard to the facility of success and the means employed! The nothingness of absolute power, and of government by one alone, was thus revealed under the reign of the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... Epaminondas; so many armies, so many nations, that leave him so far behind them. No particular quality can make any man proud, that will at the same time put the many other weak and imperfect ones he has in the other scale, and the nothingness of human condition to make up the weight. Because Socrates had alone digested to purpose the precept of his god, "to know himself," and by that study arrived at the perfection of setting himself at nought, he only was reputed worthy the title of a sage. Whosoever ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... beaks are pointed with delight, Curved sharply with desire, The passionate direction of their flight, Clear and high, Stretches their bodies taut like humming wire. The cold wind blows into angry patterns the jet-bright Feathers of their wings, Their claws curl loosely, safely, about nothingness, They clasp no things. Direction and desire they possess By which in sharp, unswerving flight they hold Across an iron sea to the golden beach Whereon lies carrion, their feast. A shore of gold That birds wrought on a vase can ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Marjorie Allen Seiffert
... with our own vileness, be sensible of our misery, and annihilate ourselves, because the Divine Majesty only communicates itself to the humble. But St. Francis proposed to himself to explain that, when it pleases God to manifest Himself in some manner to a soul which is duly sensible of its nothingness, it is better impressed with its own nothingness, by the disproportion it sees between the Sovereign Being and His creature, which discovers to it a thousand imperfections which it was not previously aware of, as a ray of the sun penetrating into a room, discovers a multitude of atoms ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... that matchless passway. Over the hills which tumble steeply on either side soared the vast Andes of the clouds, hanging palpable in the sapphire of a summer sky. What height on height of craggy softness on those silver steeps! What rounded bosomy curves of golden vapour; what sharpened pinnacles of nothingness, spiring in ever-changing contour into the intangible blue! Man the finite, reveller in the explainable and the exact, how can his eye pierce or his speech describe the rolling robes of glory in which floating ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... beautiful as on a winter's evening, when dusk almost hides the body, and they seem to issue from nothingness with a note of intimacy seldom heard by day. Such an edge was there in Mary's voice when she greeted him. About her seemed to hang the mist of the winter hedges, and the clear red of the bramble leaves. He felt himself at once stepping ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... tried to hold the lean, spasmodic arms as they traced in the air the pompous rhythm of a march that moved on silent funereal pinions through the chamber. The woman stared threateningly at the picture on the wall, the picture of the skeleton which had come from nothingness to reveal nothingness to the living. The now distraught girl, her nerves crisped by her doubts, threw herself upon the bed, her fears ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... doubt whether there are other worlds beyond ours, and account it madness to say there is nothing. Nonentity is incompatible with the infinite entity of God. They lay down two principles of metaphysics, entity which is the highest God, and nothingness which is the defect of entity. Evil and sin come of the propensity to nothingness; the sin having its cause not efficient, but in deficiency. Deficiency is, they say, of power, wisdom, or will. Sin they place in the last of these three, because he who knows ...
— The City of the Sun • Tommaso Campanells
... imperishable spirit did not cease. It continued to exist, and, in its next incarnation, became the residing spirit of that apparitional body known as Darrell Standing's which soon is to be taken out and hanged and sent into the nothingness whither all apparitions go. ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... illusion. The breaking through this illusion is progress. Consciousness itself is built on pain. Life is an evil best cured by quenching the will to live. The world is a mistake—a stupendous blunder of the blind unconscious. From it there is no escape until the world is hurled back into nothingness by a supreme effort of the collective human will. To bring about this replunge into Nirvana is the goal of the world process. The vast scheme of nature, the slow growth of mind up the long scale of organic forms, the high intelligence that crowns the summit ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... its hollow breath over the city, and all things seemed to sleep in the embrace of nothingness. The cock-crow alternated with the strokes of the clocks in the church towers and the mournful cries of the weary sentinels. A waning moon began to appear, and everything seemed to be at rest; even Ibarra himself, worn out by his sad thoughts or by ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... others dim pinpoints of glowing color. It was a scene of unspeakable grandeur, but it was so awesomely mighty in its scope, one was afraid, and his soul shriveled within him as he looked at those inconceivable masses floating forever alone in the silence of the inconceivable nothingness of eternal cold and eternal darkness. One was awed, suppressed by their sheer magnitude. A magnificent spectacle truly, but one no man ...
— Invaders from the Infinite • John Wood Campbell
... he not pause to think very seriously when he remembers the fundamental axiom that 'out of nothing, nothing can come,' and that nothing which has once existed can ever be completely annihilated? At any rate the necessary deduction must be that the life of man ends in that nothingness whence everything in existence has proceeded. To live and to die according to this book is not highly profitable. I can easily reconcile myself to the idea of annihilation, as a man who knows how to value ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... laughing. The snarl had died from his face; a dull, listless indifference had taken its place—the look one sees on the face of a beaten dog, after the beating is over, when it is lying very still, its great eyes staring into nothingness, and one ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... alone. My brain is giddy. My pulse vibrates irregularly, and my heart beats with an audible distinctness. I am oppressed with a sense of my own nothingness—an atom, almost invisible, upon the ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... rope leaped into nothingness. Had there been a big express locomotive hitched to that line, and going at full speed, I do not think the line would have paid out ...
— Swept Out to Sea - Clint Webb Among the Whalers • W. Bertram Foster
... once thrown off and severed from the thinking source, which is the immortality promised by Mr. Frederick Harrison to the select specimens of humanity whose thoughts have any reproductive power. It is not a mere preference of nothingness, or unconscious absorption, to limitation that inspires the intense yearning of the Hindu mind for Nirvana. Even in the Upanishads there are many evidences of a contrary belief, while in the Sankhya the aphorisms of Kapila unmistakably vindicate the individuality of ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... mind, once freed, weighed the evidence with a pitiless logic, paid its own tribute—despite the anguish of the heart —to the pioneers of truth whose trail it followed into the Unknown, who had held no Mystery more sacred than Truth itself, who had dared to venture into the nothingness between the whirling worlds. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... propose in case there really is a door and an old Peter to present a purified passport to," the dying man said to me with a touch of his old whimsicality. "I give up, Greg; the soul that Charlotte possesses can't be put out into nothingness; and if she's got one I have too," he said, after a moment's fight for breath. "Hurry, all of you, to get my passport made out and bring the girl here to me. Quick, get her. There is ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... far below the Leech-Gatherer's has been reached, and mind and body alike are in their last decay, the life of the Old Cumberland Beggar, at one remove from nothingness, has yet a dignity and a usefulness of its own. His fading days are passed in no sad asylum of vicious or gloomy age, but amid neighbourly kindnesses, and in the sanity of the open air; and a life that is reduced to its ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... Marines bumped and jostled with each other as they crowded in. If they had been anything but Marines, their own heads might have been turned at the discovery of this sudden materialization of a building out of nothingness. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... delight? "O Lord God," I said, almost involuntarily, "thou art very rich. Thou art the one poet, the one maker. We worship thee. Make but our souls as full of glory in thy sight as this chasm is to our eyes glorious with the forms which thou hast cloven and carved out of nothingness, and we shall be worthy to worship thee, O Lord, our God." For I was carried beyond myself with delight, and with sympathy with Connie's delight and with the calm worship of gladness in my wife's countenance. But when my eye fell on Wynnie, I saw a trouble ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... Buechner or in the aristocratic gentility of Strauss, but also such a brilliant advocate of teleology as Eduard von Hartmann does not know of any other final end to offer to the world and mankind than nothingness, because he did not wish to be driven from his perception of ends in the world to the only conclusion to which it leads—namely: to the perception of an absolute intelligent and ethical personality that directs these ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... beautiful and fascinating now as when the master-hand of the world's greatest poet delineated it, and when living, breathing Edith Allen stepped suddenly among his shadows, seemingly so luminous, they vanished before her, as the stars pale into nothingness when the eastern sky is aglow with morning. Now, in all his horizon, she only shone, but the past seemed like night, ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... aspect. His voice, which comes from the depths of his being, seems charged with some magnetic fluid; it penetrates the hearer at every pore. Disgusted by the ingratitude of the public after his many cures, he has now returned to an impenetrable solitude, a voluntary nothingness. His all-powerful hand, which has restored a dying daughter to her mother, fathers to their grief-stricken children, adored mistresses to lovers frenzied with love, cured the sick given over by physicians, soothed the ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... the priest. "Have you killed a man? Is the scaffold waiting for you? Let us reason together a little. If you are resolved, as you say, to return to nothingness, everything on earth is indifferent to ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... I am driven is that the dome of space, out of which the sun shines by day and the stars by night, contains no vast gulfs of absolute nothingness into which the soul that hates life may flee away and be at rest. At the same time the soul that hates life need not despair. The chances, as we come to estimate them, for and against the soul's survival after death, seem so curiously even, that it may easily ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... tabernacle. Yes, the day shall yet come when the intercourse between cities shall be chiefly for purposes of religious improvement—when combinations for political intrigue, or mercantile speculation, which now waken such intensity of interest in our cities, shall dwindle to their comparative nothingness; and when the world's redemption shall assume its proper magnitude; and all be stimulated to more holy devotedness, and more heavenly effort. Oh, what a day, when all our increasing facilities of intercourse with the land, and with foreign nations, shall be used mainly for ...
— The National Preacher, Vol. 2. No. 6., Nov. 1827 - Or Original Monthly Sermons from Living Ministers • William Patton
... pretty Rabbinical tradition, are generated every morning by the brook which rolls over the flowers of Paradise,—whose life is a song,—who warble till sunset, and then sink back without regret into nothingness. Such spirits have nothing to do with the detecting spear of Ithuriel or the victorious sword of Michael. It is enough for them to please and ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... hastening rapidly on to the tomb of the world's history, will pass in turn through that gloomy sepulcher of countless nations into the great inane, the eternal void, the all-embracing night of utter nothingness! With all our patriotism and scannel-piping, our boasting and our battlefields, our solemn Declarations and labored Constitutions, we are but constructing ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... only in name. There was no wall more than three feet high left standing; the whole place was shapeless, stark, blasted into nothingness. In the very centre of the mournful chaos lay three disembowelled horses and an overturned Boche ammunition waggon. The shells were still on the shelves. They were Yellow Cross, the deadliest of the Boche ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... prescribed preliminaries, in an ignominious mode, was a far other thing than as viewed in the exaltation of battle, when a man chances it hot-headed, uplifted, thrilled, in gallant comradeship, to his own fate rendered careless by a sense of his nothingness in comparison with the whole vast drama. Moreover, in going blithely to possible death in open fight, one accomplishes something for his cause; not so, going unwillingly to certain death on an enemy's gallows. It was, too, an exasperating thought that he should die to gratify the vengeful ...
— The Continental Dragoon - A Love Story of Philipse Manor-House in 1778 • Robert Neilson Stephens
... name, which I have dreaded to see in print anywhere. By prayer, reading, reflection, and God's grace helping a poor worm, I have so far overcome the natural pride of my evil nature, as to be content, and sometimes happy, in my position of nothingness. My circumstances give strength to these feelings of contentment. My age and growing weakness show me that I am come very near the margin of my poor life, and unfavourable symptoms, from time to time, strongly remind ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... and detected no trace of surprise in her features. She merely buried her face within the palms of her hands, and, with all the strength and intensity of her soul, wished that she could then and there melt into nothingness. It was the same papiya whose song floated into the room with the south breeze, and no one heard it. Endless are the beauties of the earth-but alas, how easily everything is twisted out ...
— The Hungry Stones And Other Stories • Rabindranath Tagore
... And when he turned North he heard the roaring of the cauldron Hvergelmer as it poured itself out of Niflheim, the place of darkness and dread. And Odin knew that the world must not be left between Surtur, who would destroy it with fire, and Niflheim, that would gather it back to Darkness and Nothingness. He, the eldest of the Gods, would have to win the wisdom that would ...
— The Children of Odin - The Book of Northern Myths • Padraic Colum
... illuminations, mystical emotions, a morbid fondness for shutting myself up face to face with my past. I had attributed exceptional importance to myself and had come to think that I was more than other people. But this had gradually become submerged in the positive nothingness of every day. ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... while the moon's tender light showed faces wild and fierce, that came and went, now here—now there; it glinted on head-piece and ringed mail, and flashed back from whirling steel—a round, placid moon that seemed, all at once, to burst asunder and vanish, smitten into nothingness. He was down—beaten to his knee, deafened and half blind, but struggling to his feet he staggered out from the friendly shadow of the trees, out into the open. A sword, hard-driven, bent and snapped ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... you are forever thinking you are on the brink of nothingness, when the true horizon-line is too far for you ever to reach in your ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... There were no rocks to look out for, no shoals in what was really one vast shoal, and all was smooth as milk. All the afternoon, till the sun set and the stars came out and we dropped our anchor in a luminous nothingness, a child could have navigated us; but, when the next day brought us up to the northwest corner of Andros, we found ourselves face to face with a variety of difficulties: glimmering sandbars, reaches of moon-white shoals, patches of half-made land with pines struggling knee-deep ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... As might be expected, She didn't for bric-a-brac care, So she traded the lamp For an Ecuador stamp That somebody told her was rare! This act served to madden The mind of Aladdin, But, 'spite of his impotent wrath, His manor-house vanished, To nothingness banished, And while he was taking ...
— Grimm Tales Made Gay • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... along the deck to the spot where stood her own lover, handsome Stanor, bending his head to overhear a remark from Honor, stroking his blonde moustache. He looked dejected, depressed; but compared with the depth of emotion on the other man's face, such meagre expressions faded into nothingness. The moment during which she gazed at his face held for Pixie the significance of years; then once more her eyes returned to the girl by ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... victor felt no pride. Her heart was dissolved in gratitude: she knew her nothingness, and ascribed all to God. She spoke not, she wept not: even the wonted smile forsook her lips. She only felt the immensity of the goodness of God—she only bowed before this new manifestation of his ...
— The Truce of God - A Tale of the Eleventh Century • George Henry Miles
... the hotel clerk if he remembered the lady. Did he know anything about her? No; that was so long ago. His people came and went. That was all. But Carlia had been here. That much was certain. Here was at least a fixed point in the sea of nothingness from which he could work. His wearied and confused mind could at least come back to that name in ...
— Dorian • Nephi Anderson
... been doing unconsciously. It is an axiom as regards actions acquired after birth, that we never do them automatically save as the result of long practice; the stages in the case of any acquired facility, the inception of which we have been able to watch, have invariably been from a nothingness of ignorant impotence to a little somethingness of highly self- conscious, arduous performance, and thence to the unselfconsciousness of easy mastery. I saw one year a poor blind lad of about eighteen sitting on a wall by the wayside at Varese, playing the concertina ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... not read. How the suffering and sin of one was the burden of all: the heroic endeavours and victories of one the gain of all. The little isolated aim of the individual must subject itself to the wider meaning or be swept back to nothingness, just as the stranded pools among the rocks that for a few hours caught the sunshine and reflected the heavenly lamp, but were overswept each tide and their being mingled again ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... the Seer spoke, the awful Presence glided out of Nothingness, and sat, sphinx-like, at the feet of ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... Love, casting out hate and fear, solves life's every problem! But first—Bring ye all the tithes into the storehouse, that there may be meat in mine house. Bring your whole confidence, your trust, your knowledge of the allness of good, and the nothingness of evil. Bring, too, your every earthly hope, every mad ambition, every corroding fear, and carnal belief; lay them down at the doorway of mine storehouse, ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... opponents. A few days after Webster had spoken, the Senate listened to the last words of Calhoun. He was already a dying man. He could not even deliver his final protest with his own lips. He sat, as we can picture him, those great, awful eyes staring haggardly without hope into nothingness, while a younger colleague read that protest for him to the Assembly that he had so often moved, yet never persuaded. Calhoun rejected the settlement; indeed, he rejected the whole idea of a territorial settlement on Missouri lines. It is ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... enough to outstrip him. Yet what a race he gave, for it was but at the entrance to his own Shi' that the pursuer got close enough. Fionn put a finger into the thong of the great spear, and at that cast night fell on Aillen mac Midna. His eyes went black, his mind whirled and ceased, there came nothingness where he had been, and as the Birgha whistled into his shoulder-blades he withered away, he tumbled emptily and was dead. Fionn took his lovely head from its shoulders and went back through the ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • James Stephens
... birth? No. Shall I exist after death? No. What am I? A little dust collected in an organism. What am I to do on this earth? The choice rests with me: suffer or enjoy. Whither will suffering lead me? To nothingness; but I shall have suffered. Whither will enjoyment lead me? To nothingness; but I shall have enjoyed myself. My choice is made. One must eat or be eaten. I shall eat. It is better to be the tooth than the grass. Such is my wisdom. After which, go whither I push thee, the grave-digger ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... the utter nothingness of this book, from the sale of which "Pope Eddy" is said to have realized, a half-million dollars. Says this modern goddess: "The word Adam is from the Hebrew Adamah, signifying the red color of the ground, dust, nothingness. Divide the name Adam into two syllables, and it reads ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... nothing. The hundred fishermen die, and the unpoisoned millions live. We are shadows; we have not a single right. If I die to-night, I shall have been spent by an Almighty Power that has used me. Will He cast me to nothingness after I have fulfilled my purpose? Never. There is not a gust of this wind that does not move truly according to eternal law; there can be no injustice, for no one can judge the Judge. If I suffer the petty pang of Death while a great purpose is being wrought out, ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... like motes in the sunbeam for a moment, and then are illumined no more. Legend takes some of them, and they become pictures; and the rest, it would seem, enter again into nothingness. ...
— The Treason and Death of Benedict Arnold - A Play for a Greek Theatre • John Jay Chapman
... solitude in hemming dish-towels, or making articles called "Takers." Dr. Price came, too, and even the haughty four Ryders. Alice was gratified with my popularity. But I felt cold at heart, doubtful of myself, drifting to nothingness in thought and purpose. None saw my doubts or ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... saw that his eyes were flashing, and his face working strangely in the pale moonlight. I bade him lie down again, but he did not, and then I saw that he was surely out of his mind through the terror of the sea and the long nothingness of the voyage to which he was all unused. Then he made for me with a shout, and I saw that I must fight for my life. So I closed with him and dragged him down to the bottom of the boat, and there we two struggled, till I thought that the end ...
— Wulfric the Weapon Thane • Charles W. Whistler
... privations, when you are telling them, "These are the chastenings of an all-wise and merciful Providence, sent for some inscrutable but just and beneficent purpose, it may be, to humble our pride, or to punish our unfaithfulness, or to impress us with the sense of our own nothingness and dependence on His mercy," when you are thus addressing your suffering fellow-subjects, and encouraging them to bear without repining the dispensations of Providence, may God grant that by your decision of this night you may have laid in store for yourselves the consolation of reflecting ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... awkward and seemingly impossible shape, while metal surfaces sliding on each other produced screams that cut through the din of the motor and dynamo. The writhing tube strained and wriggled. Then there was a queer, inaudible snap and something gave. A part of the tube quivered into nothingness. Another part hurt the eyes that ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... the human species as it really is, as a parcel of insects devouring one another on a little atom of clay. This true image seemed to annihilate his misfortunes, by making him sensible of the nothingness of his own being, and of that of Babylon. His soul launched out into infinity, and, detached from the senses, contemplated the immutable order of the universe. But when afterwards, returning to himself, ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... separated from the entire world, who for three years had lived in the depths of a little valley, far from the city, alone with her memories of a brilliant, happy, ardent youth, once so filled with fetes and constant homage, now given over to the horrors of nothingness? The smile of this woman proclaimed a high sense of her ...
— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd
... itinerant drab like a thing in drab cerements (they trail the dust) that ought to be dead wailing for entrance to things, tombed in those walls, that are dead. There is no life at all in these streets. There is nothing active or positive. There is just passivity and negation. There is just nothingness. They are not habitations, which connote life; they are repositories, which connote desuetude. They are the repositories of creatures, not that have done with life, for the sheer fact of living acknowledges service to life, but with ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... book-room itself had caught a darker gloom; the backs of the books seemed to have lost their gilding, and the mahogany furniture its French polish. There, like a god, Lord Cashel sate alone, throned amid clouds of awful dulness, ruling the world of nothingness around by the silent ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... its reception convinced me that I saw before me a people who had passed the culminating point of their greatness, and were now gliding rapidly down the declining slope that leads to annihilation and nothingness. ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... which, increasing, seems to produce fermentation and decay. Worms find their way to the roots; the caterpillar eats into the "boll" and destroys the staple. It would be almost impossible to enumerate all the evils the cotton-plant is heir to, all of which, however, sink into nothingness compared with the scourge of ...
— Camp-Fire and Cotton-Field • Thomas W. Knox
... and untwisting the shreds of my gloves. It seemed as though the world had slipped from under my feet and I was whirling into nothingness. ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath
... that strike us as "funny." Its basis lies in the deeper contrasts offered by life itself: the strange incongruity between our aspiration and our achievement, the eager and fretful anxieties of to-day that fade into nothingness to-morrow, the burning pain and the sharp sorrow that are softened in the gentle retrospect of time, till as we look back upon the course that has been traversed we pass in view the panorama of our lives, as people in old age may ...
— Further Foolishness • Stephen Leacock
... just begun! A life has just begun! Another soul has won The glorious spark of being! Pilgrim of life all hail! He who at first called forth, From nothingness the earth; Who piled the mighty hills, and dug the sea, Who gave the stars to gem Night like a diadem, Thou little child, made thee! Young creature of the earth, Fair as its flowers, though brought in sorrow ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 538 - 17 Mar 1832 • Various
... dropped to nothingness, but her frightened eyes, travelling fearfully into the shadowy corners of the big bedroom, completed the ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... when death has entered and removed the best friend, Fate has done her worst; the plummet has sounded the depths of grief, and thereafter nothing can inspire terror. At one fell stroke all petty annoyances and corroding cares are sunk into nothingness. The memory of a great love lives enshrined in undying amber. It affords a ballast 'gainst all the storms that blow, and although it lends an unutterable sadness, it imparts an unspeakable peace. Where there is this haunting ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... his position; he was the real sufferer, though decency compelled him to pretend it was not so. He had come to think of Emma almost angrily; she was a clog on him, and all the more irritating because he knew that his brute strength, if only he might exert it, could sweep her into nothingness at a blow. The quietness with which Alice accepted his revelation encouraged him in self-defence. He talked on for several minutes, walking about and swaying his arms, as if in this way he could literally shake himself free ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... very anticipation. And insensibility afflicts not those that are not, but those that are, when they think what damage they shall sustain by it in the loss of their being and in being suffered never to emerge from nothingness. Wherefore it is neither the dog Cerberus nor the river Cocytus that has made our fear of death boundless; but the threatened danger of not being, representing it as impossible for such as are once extinct to shift back again into being. For we cannot be born twice, and ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... important reservations that must be borne in mind in describing Arnold as a Wordsworthian will become clearer. It is as a relief from thought, as a beautiful and half-physical diversion, as a scale of being so vast and mysterious as to reduce the pettiness of human life to nothingness,—it is in these ways that nature has value in Arnold's verse. Such a poet may describe natural scenes well, and obtain by means of them contrast to human conditions, and decorative beauty; but he does not penetrate ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... the unusual that makes the average war pilot swear greatly by his job, while other soldiers temper their good work with grousing. His actions are influenced by the knowledge that somewhere, behind a ridge of clouds, in the nothingness of space, on the patchwork ground, the True Romance has hidden a new experience, which can only be found by the venturer with alert vision, a quick brain, and a fine instinct ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... cousin Jenkins of Aberga'ny, I send you, as a token, a turkey-shell comb, a kiple of yards of green ribbon, and a sarment upon the nothingness of good works, which was preached in the Tabernacle; and you will also receive a horn-buck for Saul, whereby she may learn her letters; for Fin much consarned about the state of her poor sole — and what are all the pursuits of this life to the consarns of that immortal ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... Richard Strauss appears to me up to the present. Guntram kills Duke Robert, and immediately lets fall his sword. The frenzied laugh of Zarathustra ends in an avowal of discouraged impotence. The delirious passion of Don Juan dies away in nothingness. Don Quixote when dying forswears his illusions. Even the Hero himself admits the futility of his work, and seeks oblivion in an indifferent Nature. Nietzsche, speaking of the artists of our time, laughs at "those Tantaluses of the will, ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... no favor, Smallest nothingness; I will hoard thy dropt glove's savor, Wafture of ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... Fools were we all; and some malignant God Beguiled us; for the one great war-defence Left us, since Aeacus' son in battle fell, Was Aias' mighty strength. And now the Gods Will to our loss destroy him, bringing bane On thee and me, that all we may fill up The cup of doom, and pass to nothingness." ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... collapse without a fierce struggle—but the struggle was inward, and the rolling world was not agitated by it, and rolled calmly on. For of all the "ideals of life" which the world, in its rolling, inconsiderately flattens out to nothingness, the least likely to retain a profile is that ideal which depends upon inheriting money. George Amberson, in spite of his record of failures in business, had spoken shrewdly when he realized at last that money, like life, was ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... primarily to rouse those of his own class that he labored, to gall them into seeing (though they should turn again and rend him) that moral supineness is moral decay, that the soul shrivels into nothingness when wrong is acquiesced in, as surely as it is torn and scattered by the furies let loose within it, when wrong is done. But just there lay the difficulty and pain of his mission: that, from his ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... the nome was master of them all—their prince, their ruler, their king. It was he alone who governed the world, he alone kept it in good order, he alone had created it. Not that he had evoked it out of nothing; there was as yet no concept of nothingness, and even to the most subtle and refined of primitive theologians creation was only a bringing of ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... trouble in distinguishing the pupils of the teachers holding this view. They will be found to exhibit the most negative mental condition—a natural result of absorbing the constant suggestion of "nothingness"—the gospel of negation. In marked contrast to the mental condition of the students, however, will be observed the mental attitude of the teachers, who are almost uniformly examples of vital, positive, mental force, capable of hurling ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... of human requirements and enjoyments. Betrayed by appetite he had been driven forth by the prayers of the abbot, and solaced by his petitions for the future life. Deign to let the matter rest there, and not pursue him into the inanity, the nothingness of Nirvana. To this the practiced ear of the holy Bankei gave deep thought. This fellow already had forced the unhappy Kakunai to follow in his tracks. What might he not do to others in whom the abbot had far greater interest? "To such wickedness the gift of Nirvana is not ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... sure like to see any blamed old slide get the best of me, that's all. I'm going to seal that slide down so that it'll stay there for a million years. And when the last trump sounds, and Sonoma Mountain and all the other mountains pass into nothingness, that old slide will be still a-standing there, held up ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... department of morals, is so constructed as to be unreadable. Now it will not be denied that as far as these two factors are concerned—and I repeat they are almost always found in combination—the position of the Book has dwindled almost to nothingness. One could give examples of almost every kind: one could show how poetry, no matter how appreciated or praised, no longer sells. One could show—and this is one of the worst signs of all—how men will buy by the hundred thousand anything at all which has the hall mark of an established reputation, ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... among the Martians. What a lion I should be!" I looked longingly at the distant planet, the outlines of whose continents and seas appeared most enticing, but when I tried to propel myself in that direction I only kicked against nothingness. ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss
... moments of amiable weakness which make us all akin, when sublime ambition, the mystical predispositions of genius, the solemn sense of duty, all the heaped-up lore of ages, and the dogmas of a high philosophy alike desert us, or sink into nothingness. The voice of his mother sounded in his ear, and he was haunted by his father's anxious glance. Why was he there? Why was he, the child of a northern isle, in the heart of the Stony Arabia, far from the scene of his birth and of his duties? ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... works after her death in 1678, admits that she was "one of the greatest visionaries in the world on the chapter of death." She herself expressed her hypochondria otherwise: "I fear death more than other people do, because no one has ever formed so clear a conception of nothingness as I have." Ludicrous stories were told of her excessive fear of illness, and in her fits of alarm she found comfort from the ministrations of Antoine Singlin, who was the director of Pascal's conscience.[2] ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... stupendous subject of contemplation than this has ever been offered to the mind of man. In comparison with the length of time thus required to efface the tiny individual atom, the entire cosmical career of our solar system, or even that of the whole starry galaxy, shrinks into utter nothingness. Whether we shall adopt the conclusion suggested must depend on the extent of our speculative audacity. We have seen wherein its probability consists, but in reasoning upon such a scale we may fitly be cautious and modest in accepting inferences, ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... existences; these are but the vague names with which faculties, constructed only to deal with conditional phenomena, disguise their incapacity. The world in the Hindoo legend rested upon the back of the tortoise. It was a step between the world and nothingness, and served to cheat the imagination with ideas ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... another's grief? And, when we do, by what standard can we measure it? More especially is comprehension rare, if we chance to be the original cause of the trouble. Do we think of the feelings of the beetles it is our painful duty to crush into nothingness? Not at all. If we have any compunctions, they are quickly absorbed in the pride of our capture. And more often still, as in the present case, we set our foot upon the poor victim by ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... believed that this world is empty and void, because it is spiritual; and you believed so because you had conceived an idea of what is spiritual abstracted from what is material; and that which is so abstracted appeared to you as nothingness, thus as empty and void; when nevertheless in this world there is a fulness of all things. Here all things are SUBSTANTIAL and not material: and material things derive their origin from things substantial. We who live here are ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... now had neither fear nor compunction in asserting that authority which would be his to the full to-morrow. He felt that there was a vein of rebellion in Elsa's character, and this he meant to drain and to staunch till it had withered to nothingness. It would never do for him—of all men—to have a rebellious or ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... There was the trouble. Now and then a hope, which he told himself was futile, would spring unbidden to his heart, establish itself as a radiant guest. Yet presently it would depart, mocking him; or fade into nothingness leaving a blank greyness in ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... mused the enthusiastic painter, as he trod the street. "Thou art the image of the Creator's own. The innumerable forms, that wander in nothingness, start into being at thy beck. The dead live again. Thou recallest them to their old scenes, and givest their gray shadows the lustre of a better life, at once earthly and immortal. Thou snatchest back the fleeting moments of History. With thee, there is no Past; for, at thy ...
— The Prophetic Pictures (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... way of excuse one visitor said she had always understood that the man was very good-for-nothing. But happily there is no better dispeller of mental {18} fog than a friendly conference of those who are in earnest, and it did not take long to convince these conferees that the man's good-for-nothingness was, in part at least, their own fault. I shall have occasion to speak more than once, in this book, of the power of suggestion. Even here, where these relief visitors had never given the head of the family a thought, they had taught him a lesson. From their whole line ...
— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond
... obscure life to a higher sphere of action. Love the duties of the latter, not because they are more important in the eyes of men, but because they are in the order of God's will for you. It is well that you should be impressed with your nothingness, for on that foundation it is that the Almighty will erect the edifice of your perfection; but content yourself wherever He places you—there for you is sanctity. Whether your position is a high one or a low, be humble, and you will be happy." After having rendered ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"
... awful time? Nowhere within the ken of the banished youth. In his own feeling Cosmo was outside the city of life—not even among the dogs—outside with bare nothingness—cold negation. Alas for him who had so lately offered to help another to pray, thinking the hour would never come to him when he could not pray! It had COME! He did not try to pray. The thought of ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... nothing. He is one of the disinherited. Properly speaking, he has no existence at all, or, to be strictly truthful, he had no existence till M. Anatole France's philosophic mind and human sympathy have called him up from his nothingness for our pleasure, and, as the title-page of the book has it, no doubt for ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... simply nothing, and nothingness does not excite or terrify one. I never felt better than I ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... could not; there was no more time for prayer. One struggle and the stillness crept into my brain. The terror passed; an unfathomable weight of sleep pressed me down. I was dying, I was dying, and then—nothingness! ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... army just now is recruited out of pretty tough material. To be in the ranks is almost a confession of good-for-nothingness. You are an officer's daughter and understand ...
— Molly McDonald - A Tale of the Old Frontier • Randall Parrish
... the Canadian Pacific Railway, when, on awakening, I beheld directly opposite my window lovely Lake Louise and the beautiful glacier mirrored within the opalescent blue. This day in Japan ended with a glorious sunset, and, as the gold and azure melted away into nothingness, it was a fitful close to hours of ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... on a prayer stool, left.] She flees from me, as I flee from my bad thoughts! Alone, forsaken—what more is there for me in life? Naught have I learned of life save its nothingness, and no wishes are left to me but evil ones. My soul would be like an empty shell were it not filled with her! My life—Ah, what has it been? [Pall pounds on floor.] What was that?—Ghosts in the sunshine? That would be a funny sight! [Broom raps on floor.] Again! ...
— Lucky Pehr • August Strindberg
... they had been talking in low tones, impressed by the silence of the great necropolis; but little by little human interests asserted themselves in a louder key even there where their nothingness lay exposed on all those flat stones covered with dates and figures, as if death was only an affair of time and calculation—the desired solution of ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... companion. She was gazing up at him with a strange expression of gladness, of relief, on her face. The long years of restraint and measured coldness seemed to have vanished, receded into nothingness. ...
— The Uttermost Farthing • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... inaudible, guiding that chariot, sure as the flight of a comet, straight to its goal? Or was there a soul to that machine whose myriad wheels went grinding on and on, grinding the stars into dust, matter into man, and man into nothingness? Was there—could there be a living heart to the universe that did positively hear him—poor, misplaced, dishonest, ignorant Thomas Wingfold, who had presumed to undertake a work he neither could perform nor had the courage to forsake, when ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... that had last borne her across the still bosom of the Huron, fleeing for ever from the fortress where her arrival had been so joyously hailed—when she saw that fortress itself presenting the hideous spectacle of a blackened mass of ruins fast crumbling into nothingness—when, in short, she saw nothing but what reminded her of the terrific past, the madness of reason returned, and the desolation of her heart was complete. And then, again, when she thought of her generous, her brave, her beloved, and too unfortunate ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... pupils and go on in the same humdrum way. There would be the same harsh teachers, the same ignorance and obstinacy, the same punishment and suffering. The worst of it is that Mercury does not seem exempt from the general curse of nothingness which seems to brood over all physical existence. There is no stability even in solar systems. Even we puny creatures can divine something of their birth and death. Out of whirling nebulae suns and planets are born; souls slowly evolve on worlds ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... the night, through all these hours Of nothingness, with ceaseless music wakes Among the hills, trying the melodies Of myriad chords on the lone, darkened air, With lavish power, self-gladdened, caring nought That there is none to hear. How beautiful! That men should live ...
— The Bride of Fort Edward • Delia Bacon
... meditating on Thy infinite greatness and my own nothingness, so that all the questions of my life may be answered and my mind abundantly instructed ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... BISHOP PETER came (That was the kindly Bishop's name), He heard these dreadful oaths with shame, And chid their want of dress. (Except a shell—a bangle rare— A feather here—a feather there The South Pacific Negroes wear Their native nothingness.) ...
— More Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... the problem of the world, and revealed the wonderful art displayed therein by the Supreme Architect. Never before, in the history of the human race, was so impressive a conviction made of the almost absolute nothingness of man, when measured on the inconceivably magnificent scale of the universe. No one, it is well known, felt this conviction more deeply than Newton himself. "I have been but as a child," said he, "playing on the sea-shore; now finding some pebble rather more polished, ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... of inexorable sadness, the sadness of fate itself in Andrew's voice. He had, as he spoke, the full realization of that stage of progress which is simply for the next, which passes to make room for it. He felt his own nothingness. It was the throe of the present before the future; it was the pang ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... contemplation of it. You sometime since exprest an intention you had of finishing some extensive work on the Evidences of Natural and Revealed Religion. Have you let that intention go? Or are you doing any thing towards it? Make to yourself other ten talents. My letter is full of nothingness. I talk of nothing. But I must talk. I love to write to you. I take a pride in it. It makes me think less meanly of myself. It makes me think myself not totally disconnected from the better part of Mankind. I know, I am too dissatisfied ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... movement. This visual sensation of vibration is a purely subjective one, the external cause of the phenomenon is the sound. The outer world is a concert of sounds which rises in the immensity of space. Matter is noise and nothingness ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... Philip was to be Another Philip—only less! To win his wit in full degree Would bear to him but nothingness, From one ...
— The Mistress of the Manse • J. G. Holland
... have once tasted this, the sweetest of all human delights, how it is possible for any rational mind afterwards to submit to be whirled round in the vortex of dissipation, to tolerate, to endure, the empty, vain, comfortless, nothingness of fashionable amusements, now appears to me to be almost inexplicable. The real felicity imparted and received in a happy domestic circle, in one evening, far, very far surpasses all the pleasures derived from the ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... waiting-room, and pass out again, laughing. The snarl had died from his face; a dull, listless indifference had taken its place—the look one sees on the face of a beaten dog, after the beating is over, when it is lying very still, its great eyes staring into nothingness, and one wonders ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... Argos—Agamemnon comes. Then hail and greet him well! such meed befits Him whose right hand hewed down the towers of Troy With the great axe of Zeus who righteth wrong— And smote the plain, smote down to nothingness Each altar, every shrine; and far and wide Dies from the whole land's ...
— The House of Atreus • AEschylus
... at least had not darkened his life; he had not spent all his days in dying preliminary deaths, as did the Thane of Cawdor. But it is difficult for us not to believe that a wound, that bleeds a few hours, must crumble away into nothingness all the peace ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... wholly separate the impressions which each independent organ imparts. The whale, therefore, must see one distinct picture on this side, and another distinct picture on that side; while all between must be profound darkness and nothingness to him. Man may, in effect, be said to look out on the world from a sentry-box with two joined sashes for his window. But with the whale, these two sashes are separately inserted, making two distinct windows, ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... this. She little imagined what she required of him. Two of his golden minutes melted into nothingness. They were growing to be jewels of price, one by one more and more precious as they ran, and now so costly-rare—rich as his blood! not to kindest relations, dearest friends, could he give another. The die is cast! ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... be seen; she had vanished. Morris called and called, but could get no answer, while the great dead carcass of the ship rolled and laboured above, its towering mass of iron threatening to fall and crush him and his tiny craft to nothingness. He shouted and shouted again; then in despair lashed his boat to the companion, and ran up ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... days of friendly intercourse when it seemed we talked nothings and wandered and meandered among subjects, but always we had our eyes on one another. And afterwards I would spend long hours in recalling and analyzing those nothings, questioning their nothingness, making out of things too submerged and impalpable for the rough drags of recollection, promises and indications. I would invent ingenious things to say, things pushing out suddenly from nothingness to extreme significance. I rehearsed a ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... of Charlemagne, devoted their entire lives to repeated and furious civil wars, in which the empire fell apart, the flower of the Frankish race perished, and the strength of its dominion was sapped to nothingness.[1] ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... of beauty is a joy forever: Its loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness; but still will keep A bower quiet for us, and a sleep, Full of sweet dreams, ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... no fortune and no future to offer you," said Josephine. "What he is, he is only through the friendship of Bonaparte. He has no estate, no importance, no celebrity. Were Bonaparte to abandon him he would fall back into nothingness and obscurity again." ...
— Queen Hortense - A Life Picture of the Napoleonic Era • L. Muhlbach
... cardinal. The Guises, who had touched with their hand the sceptre of Henry III., the Condes, who had placed their foot on the steps of the throne of Henry IV., and Gaston, who had tried upon his brow the crown of Louis XIII.,—all returned, at the voice of the minister, if not into nothingness, at least into impotency. All who struggled against the iron will, enclosed in that feeble body, were broken like glass. And all the struggle which Richelieu sustained, he did not sustain for his own ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... may be said to have only one surface—that of the water which is pushed back by the contained air. Just as such bubbles are not water, but are precisely the spots from which water is absent, so these units are not koilon, but the absence of koilon—the only spots where it is not—specks of nothingness floating in it, so to speak, for the interior of these space-bubbles is an absolute void to the highest power of vision that ...
— Occult Chemistry - Clairvoyant Observations on the Chemical Elements • Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater
... raised the doctrines of the atomists, incorporealists, epicureans, theists, and atheists, and all the other races of dreamers that have disturbed the common sense, lethargy, or comfort of the world for thousands of years; so that nothing could have better proved the absolute nothingness of their favourite maxim, that nothing could come from nothing, than the effects of that very dogma itself, for nothing ever made such a stir in the moral world, since it deserved to be called something. But a more extraordinary circumstance is, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... also treasures of disappointed pleasure and of bitterness in this picture of 'The Lamentations of Earth to Heaven,'—dim symbol of human suffering. How does one, in the presence of this poem, feel filled with the spirit of St. Augustine, the nothingness of what we call joy, happiness, glory, here below,—delights of a moment, which at most only aid us to traverse in a dream this valley of tears! Certain pages of 'The City of God,' funeral prayers of Bossuet, can alone serve us for a comparison, in order ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... the cry was lost in the wilderness of silence. It died out, a heart-broken moan of despair, fading to nothingness ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... Hero should, but minces along under his enormous mask; Helen or Polyxena would find him too realistically feminine to pass for them; and what shall an invincible Heracles say? Will he not swiftly pound man and mask together into nothingness with his club, for womanizing ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... was the fact that on that august and unapproachable day the pulpit vases stood erect and empty, though Nancy Wentworth had filled them every Sunday since any one could remember. This instance, though felt at the time to be of mysterious significance if the cause were ever revealed, paled into nothingness when, after the ringing of the last bell, Nancy Wentworth walked up the aisle on Justin Peabody's arm, and they took their seats side by side in the old ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... chance on any defective goods. We had 20 rounds of shell for each gun. When we got the order—"Fire!" gaps were torn in the wire by my gun, and the other gun had blown away some small ridges. We were going strong when a shell—the very first one—took our other gun, blowing it and the crew into nothingness. We went on firing until we had exploded 18 shells and had made several gaps in the wire, when, without a moment's warning, our trench mine exploded. The trenches were packed with troops ready for the word. A mountain of debris was shot in the air and back over ...
— S.O.S. Stand to! • Reginald Grant
... it belongs to the changing, perishable bodies which are created anew with each incarnation; and it goes down, and out, into nothingness, with the ...
— The Devil - A Tragedy of the Heart and Conscience • Joseph O'Brien
... in fact, keep just one perfect sample, and let all the rest placidly drift back to nothingness? Or, better, why not take all the goodness that there is in all the men and women that ever were and melt it all down into one cosmic ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... point is long, and sown thick with obstacles, and at the moment at which we have arrived he had not yet entered upon it, he did not even suspect its existence; all he knew was that pleasure leads to nothingness, to ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... more—blinking, following the erratic course by the pull of the stream. All bobbing along toward the rugged coastline of the islet. Those had appeared out of nothingness as suddenly as the globes ...
— Star Hunter • Andre Alice Norton
... of ancient philosophy that the life of the wise man should be a contemplation of, and a preparation for, death. It certainly was so with Marcus Aurelius. The thoughts of the nothingness of man, and of that great sea of oblivion which shall hereafter swallow up all that he is and does, are ever present to his mind; they are thoughts to which he recurs more constantly than any other, and from which he always draws the ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... hand. With his left he fended himself from the cliff. He looked down. For an instant, accustomed though he was to the high places among the mountain crags, his senses reeled before the impression of unsubstantial vastness. Out beyond him was nothingness for what seemed endless distance. Straight below was the sheer wall of the precipice, with hardly a rift for five hundred feet. There a ledge showed dimly. Then, again, a half-thousand feet of vertical rocks to ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... been so inconsiderate as to fall in love. Yes, he has. And he has fallen in love as absolutely and as idiotically as if he were twenty-one instead of fifty-two. Now, will you kindly tell me how Mr. John Smith is going to fade away into nothingness? And, even if he finds the way to do that, shall he, before fading, pop the question for Mr. Stanley G. Fulton, or shall he trust to Mr. Stanley G. Fulton's being able to win for himself the love Mr. John Smith fondly hopes ...
— Oh, Money! Money! • Eleanor Hodgman Porter
... desperate condition, or riding to Baxter and taking the train from thence to El Paso—his eyes open to what he was doing, both as a self-appointed Samaritan and as a much-wanted individual in the town where Pete lay unconscious, on the very last thin edge of Nothingness. ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... feared it could not be settled before the end of April. John Ball sat by, leaning his face, as usual, upon his umbrella, and saying nothing. It did, for a moment, strike Miss Mackenzie as singular, that she should be reduced from affluence to absolute nothingness in the way of property, in so very placid a manner. Mr Slow seemed to be thinking that he was, upon the whole, doing ...
— Miss Mackenzie • Anthony Trollope
... but through the shaft That held the polar pivot, eye to eye, Look now—blank nothingness! As though Change laughed At man's presumption and his puny craft, The star has slipped its leash and roams ...
— Artemis to Actaeon and Other Worlds • Edith Wharton
... type nor symbol stand, No mediator, were he more divine Than the incarnate Christ. All forms, all priests, I part aside, and hold communion free Beneath the empty sky of noon, with naught Between my nothingness and thy high heavens— Spirit with spirit. O, have mercy, God! Cleanse me from lust and bitterness and pride, Have mercy in accordance with my faith." Long time he lay upon the scorching grass, With his face buried in the tangled weeds. Ah! who can tell the struggles of his ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... they called it death—pale death—mors pallida. They saw that word like a gigantic granite block suspended over them, and slowly coming down. Some, turning up their faces at the sight, trembled painfully, awaiting their obliteration. Others, unable, while they still lived, to face the thought of nothingness, inflated by some spiritual wind, and thinking always of their individual forms, called out unceasingly that those selves of theirs would and must survive this word—that in some fashion, which no man could understand, each self-conscious entity reaccumulated after distribution. Drunk ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Spotted in guilty wise, A stranger unto faith, Whose tongue is stained with lies, And shalt thou count his sins—so is he lost, Uprooted by thy breath. Like to a stream by tempest tossed, His life falls from him like a cloak, He passes into nothingness, like smoke. Then spare him, punish not, be kind, I pray, To him who dwelleth in the dust, ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... had fled out of London before ever he had seen Amanda? They might be able to do it perhaps, but they never would. It just happened that in the very moment when the edifice of his noble resolutions had been ready, she had stepped into it—out of nothingness and nowhere. She wasn't an accident; that was just the point upon which they were bound to misjudge her; she was an embodiment. If only he could show her to them as she had first shown herself ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... take Gail over to the surgeon right away—" His voice trailed off somewhere and all was blank nothingness to me. But my last impression was that my uncle stayed behind with the ...
— Vanguards of the Plains • Margaret McCarter
... was from him, presumably, that Joe had inherited his passion for melody and harmony; and it was no wonder that David recognized so soon in the blind boy the spirit that made them kin. At the first stroke of David's bow, indeed, the dingy walls about them would crumble into nothingness, and together the two boys were off in a fairy world of ...
— Just David • Eleanor H. Porter
... for natural intonation. Then its incapability of sustaining a note has led, as the only means of producing effect, to those infinitesimal subdivisions of sound, in which all sentiment and expression are twittered and frittered into nothingness. ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... luminous mist, the only visible manifestation of life being a delicate but rhythmical deepening of the central hue. The wash of my wading seems not to affect them. I become conscious of the sudden appearance and swift disappearance of lesser spheres of startling brilliance. They emerge from nothingness, pause for a moment, and shoot towards me with extraordinary impulse. Each is a mere globule, resplendently blue. The tint intensifies as with accelerated velocity the atom flies until of its own excessive energy it explodes ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... which he had never even remotely imagined. The tailor was occupied with his own thoughts, and did not notice the wildness that for an instant appeared in Brandon's eyes. The latter for a moment felt paralyzed and struck down into nothingness by the shock ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... but the three, swathed in their blankets, and, hidden in the dark thickets, had no fear. They were merely three motes in the wilderness and the warriors did not dream that they were near. When the last sound of their marching had sunk into nothingness, ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... Miss Anthony again journeyed westward, though she says in her diary: "It never was harder for me to start. A heavy nothingness is upon head and heart." She went first to the State Suffrage Convention at Indianapolis, where as usual she was a guest in the beautiful home of Mr. and Mrs. Sewall. A reception was given her at the Bates ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... darkness I can learn To tremble and adore; To sound my own vile nothingness, And thus to love ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... he sent for him to the presence; and finding him equally agreeable in his conversation and manners, he raised him rapidly, but gradually, from the situation of a common soldier, to the highest station in the empire. Such sudden changes, from a state of nothingness to the summit of power, have frequently been observed to be attended with consequences no less fatal to the man so elevated, than pernicious to the public: and thus it happened to this favourite minister. During the life of his old master, ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... Though his span of life is small, it nevertheless has a definite relationship to the whole of history, and there is some encouragement for a man to work for the good of his race. But this encouragement dwindles into nothingness when a man believes in those many aeons of human life, each aeon being in itself an immense reach ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... pyramids, which by their figure, as well as size, have triumphed over the injuries of time and the Barbarians. But what efforts soever men may make, their nothingness will always appear. These pyramids were tombs; and there is still to be seen, in the middle of the largest, an empty sepulchre, cut out of one entire stone, about three feet deep and broad, and a little above six feet long.(274) Thus all this bustle, all this ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... the three first syllables, one by one, from a pure antispastic acatalectic tetrameter? Now, sir, there are three questions for you: theatrical, mythological, and metrical; to every one of which an Athenian would give an answer that would lay me prostrate in my own nothingness. ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... and yet with a peace in his heart that he had not known for years. He had saved his friend from the first wild melee of the war—the war that promised rest and nothingness to him, even while he kept his promise to "live ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... soulless world. At this moment, I doubt not, he is exacting, that under the masks of a Pantaloon and a Pulcinello there should be a heart glowing with unearthly desires and ideal aspirations, and that Harlequin should out moralise Hamlet upon the nothingness of sublunary things; and should it not be so, the dew will rise into his eyes, and he will turn his back on the whole scene with ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... their most widely read Journal,[3202] and by the mere fact of that declaration, "the people of France are assembled and insurgent. They have repossessed themselves of the sovereign power." Their magistrates, their deputies, all constituted authorities, return to nothingness, their essential state. And you, temporary and revocable representatives, "you are nothing but presiding officers for the people; you have nothing to do but to collect their votes, and to announce the result when these shall have been cast with due solemnity."—Nor ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... to him—turned to a recess of the chamber—drew aside a curtain, that veiled a crucifix and a small table, on which lay a Bible and the monastic emblems of the skull and crossbones—emblems, indeed, grave and irresistible, of the nothingness of power, and the uncertainty of life. Before these sacred monitors, whether to humble or to elevate, knelt that proud and aspiring man; and when he rose, it was with a lighter step and more cheerful mien than he had worn ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... at the paper before her with dazed, tear-blinded eyes, as bit by bit her innocent little air-castle crumbled into nothingness. Then her glance fell on the words she had written, and laying her face down on them she began to sob. "Dear old father," she whispered, brokenly. "I asked them for bread and they gave me a stone. And it's because you have to work. They despise you for that, you ...
— Cicely and Other Stories • Annie Fellows Johnston
... of internationalism, the recognition, i.e. that distinction of nationality sinks into nothingness before the idea of the union of all progressive races in the effort to realise the ideal of true society as understood by ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... and to be wedded entirely with matter. But does not the continual mutation of matter and the universal lot of final dissolution teach us the unessential character of this union, and that it is no intimate fusion? Art, accordingly, in the merely superficial animation of its works, but represents Nothingness ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... were the first words of the stranger's greeting, who acted as if he were greatly pleased with the return of Joe's pal to the "Windy City." "I too am glad to be once more where one's eyes do not tire looking into nothingness, bounded only by the horizon and the blue sky," answered Slippery, and then in a whisper, he added: "Say, Boston Frank, give me a square tip where Bunko Bill's gang is, so I can find a temporary hangout until I get straight as to the lay of the land." ...
— The Trail of the Tramp • A-No. 1 (AKA Leon Ray Livingston)
... immortal than the stars; at another that they are mere shadows cast by the baleful sun of desire upon the shallow and fleeting water we call Life which seems to flow out of nowhere into nowhere. At one time we are full of faith, at another all such hopes are blotted out by a black wall of Nothingness, and so on ad infinitum. Only very stupid people, or humbugs, are or pretend to be, always ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... mirage deludes the traveller in the Hungarian plain with the fair presentment of a lake fringed with forest-trees; but the semblance fades into nothingness, and he finds himself still in an endless waste, "without a mark, without a bound." Dreary, inexpressibly dreary to all save those who are born within its limits; for, strange to say, they love their ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... counted on Nell, and expected him, had high hopes for him; and here they were dashed into nothingness! Who knew that he could be so obstinate over a trifle? Surely it was a trifle just to come to prayer-meeting once! She knew she would have done it for him, even in the days when it would have been a bore. She did not understand it ...
— The Chautauqua Girls At Home • Pansy, AKA Isabella M. Alden
... less than our own heart-beat Its puny nothingness sinks out of sight. Just you and I and Love alone are ...
— Tobogganing On Parnassus • Franklin P. Adams
... all that is good; and next to make offerings to Earth and to the dead, and specially to thy husband King Darius, whom thou sawest in visions of the night, that he may send blessings from below to thy son, and turn away all trouble into darkness and nothingness." ...
— Stories from the Greek Tragedians • Alfred Church
... voice was stilled into nothingness by the shrill, reawakening falsetto. "Go on, Westley! Lauzanne wins—wins—wins!" it seemed to repeat. Allis sank back into her seat. She knew it was all over. The shuffle of many feet hastening madly, the crash of eager heels down the wooden steps, a surging, ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... Labourers' Bill in the succeeding session. When that session came Mr Wyndham had, however, other fish to fry. The Irish Party and the Orange gang were howling for his head, and his days of useful service in Ireland were reduced to nothingness. Meanwhile we kept pressing our demands as energetically as we could on the public notice, but we were systematically boycotted in the Press and by the Nationalist leaders until a happy circumstance changed the whole outlook for us. It was our custom to invite to all our great Labour ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... beautiful thou art, Shading the ruin, clinging round the tomb, And ling'ring still, tho' all beside depart; Can the cold sceptic, with his creed of gloom, Deem that thy final dwelling is the dust, Thy faith but folly, nothingness ...
— The Poetry of Wales • John Jenkins
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