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More "Vacuity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... were discouraged and thwarted; and after the positive lessons were over, and her education was said to be finished, she felt vacuity and ennui when Jane rejoiced in full employment. The housekeeping was ostensibly taken by the sisters in alternate weeks; but though Jane relinquished the keys for the stated period, she never relinquished the superintendence. She remembered ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... to succeed as well with what is termed negative electricity in the theory of Dr. Franklin, as with what is termed positive electricity; but in that theory the negative electricity means a less quantity or total deprivation or vacuity of that fluid; now to condense negative electricity by lowering the suspended chain into the tankard ought to make it less negative; whereas in this experiment I am told it becomes more so, as appears by its stronger repulsion of cork balls suspended ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... place was new to her. After breakfast was cleared away I proceeded to give directions for dinner; it was merely a plain joint of meat, I said, to be roasted in the tin oven. The experienced cook looked at me with a stare of entire vacuity. "The tin oven," I repeated, "stands there," pointing ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... grows dark and infernal to me! Behind its glitter stalks the shadow of Eternal Death; through it too I look not 'up into the divine eye,' as Richter has it, 'but down into the bottomless eyesocket'—not up towards God, Heaven, and the Throne of Truth, but too truly down towards Falsity, Vacuity, and ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... looked at him without a frown or a sneer; he waited for him to kick and annoy him as he came out of, or went in to, the schoolroom. In fact, he did his very best to make the boy's life miserable, and the occupation of hating him seemed in some measure to fill up the vacuity of an ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... and broadly-painted draperies, a striking contrast to the weak attitudes and niggling robes of the central group. Signorelli has indeed hardly altered the childish chubby features of the Deacon in the middle, nor the benevolent vacuity of the two Bishops, so different to his own ...
— Luca Signorelli • Maud Cruttwell
... Floats on the far empyrean, and below The yellow springs; but nowhere in great space Can he find aught of her. At length he hears An old-world tale: an Island of the Blest* — So runs the legend — in mid-ocean lies In realms of blue vacuity, too faint To be described; there gaily coloured towers Rise up like rainbow clouds, and many gentle And beautiful Immortals pass their days In peace. Among them there is one whose name Sounds upon lips as Eternal. By the bloom ...
— A Lute of Jade/Being Selections from the Classical Poets of China • L. Cranmer-Byng
... for utterance, and "My mother!" "My son!" were the only words that either could articulate. At length, raising his head, Colonel Lennox fixed his eyes on his mother's face with a gaze of deep and fearful inquiry; but no returning glance spoke there. With that mournful vacuity, peculiar to the blind, which is a thousand times more touching than all the varied expression of the living orb, she continued to regard the vacant space which imagination had filled with the image she ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... politicians may divert the order of things, but they cannot change our nature—they may create an universal taste for literature, but they will never unite it with habits of industry; and until they prove how men are to live without labour, they have no right to banish the chearful vacuity which usually accompanies it, by substituting reflections to make it irksome, and propensities with ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... and observation. The thoughts of this orphan boy clung to her heartstrings with a fondness for which she herself was unable to account. He seemed to have been sent to her by Heaven, to fill up those intervals of languor and vacuity which deprived her of much enjoyment. Perhaps he was not less dear to her, because she well saw that he was a favourite with no one else, and because she felt, that to give him up was to afford the judgment ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... of the season which is called Silly in the world of journalism, because the outer vacuity then responds to the inner, and the empty brain vainly interrogates the empty environment for something to write of, two friends of the Easy Chair offered to spend a holiday in search of material for a paper. The only conditions they ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... itself. If the supposed First Cause is not necessarily self-existent and independent, it is not the first; if it has a dependent existence, there must be a prior being on which it depends. If the First Cause is not eternal, then prior to this Ultimate Cause there was nothingness and vacuity, and pure nothing, by its own act, became something. But "Ex nihilo nihil" is a universal law of thought. To ask the question whether the First Cause be self-existent and eternal, is, in effect, to ask the question "who made God?" and this ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... broken banes Are weel as flesh and banes can be. She beats the taeds that live in stanes, An' fatten in vacuity! They die when they're exposed to air— They canna thole the atmosphere; But her!—expose her onywhere— She lives ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... join Mrs. Benington without delay. You may see me when and as often as you please. When it is proper to renew the present topic, it shall be renewed. Till then we will be silent.—Here Ludloe left me alone, but not to indifference or vacuity. Indeed I was overwhelmed with the reflections that arose from this conversation. So, said I, I am still saved, if I have wisdom enough to use the opportunity, from the consequences of past concealments. By a distinction which I had ...
— Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist - (A Fragment) • Charles Brockden Brown
... of disquiet and weariness and weeping, still the heart would hunger and be empty of its true possession unless God Himself had flowed into it. It were but a poor advancement and the gain of a loss, if yearnings were made immortal, and the aching vacuity, which haunts every soul that is parted from God, were cursed with immortality. It would be so, if it be not true that the inheritance is nothing less than the fuller possession ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... or ludicrous creatures, so to be whipped up and baked crisp, revealed, in the light of the analogy, the tempting vacuity of a bowl of white of egg. When Tante introduced her wit into the colourless substance she frothed it to ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... quality should count heaviest in your esteem. You will be in no danger of weighing a mere maladroitness of manner against a fine trait of character, or of letting a graceful deportment blind you to a fundamental vacuity. When in doubt, ignore style, and think of the matter as you would ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... them off, however, the old sense of hollowness was upon him again. His life there reminded him of a gaudy drop-scene, let down before an empty stage; a painted sham, with darkness and vacuity behind. At bottom, none of these distinctions and successes meant anything to him; not a scrap of mental pabulum could be got from them: rather would he have chosen to be poor and a nobody among people whose thoughts flew to meet his half-way. And there was also another side to it. Stingy though ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... march became for me a mere, mechanical, wearisome task, for on ordinary occasions it was my custom to maintain a pace of greater rapidity. Thus, eventually I sank into the semiconscious condition amid which the soul turns to vacuity, and one no longer thinks of oneself, but, on the contrary issues from one's personality, and begins to see objects with unwonted clarity, and to hear sounds with unwonted precision. Under my feet the seams in the blue-grey, leaden ice lay full of water, while as for the ice itself, it ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... away. He must not look at her professionally. Despair imparted to his countenance a look of stony vacuity which sat ...
— Geoffrey Strong • Laura E. Richards
... that shot through the narrow slit which served for a window, "Is he not there?—stand out o' the light, and let me look upon him ance mair. But the darkness is in my ain een," she said, sinking back, after an earnest gaze upon vacuity—"it's a' ended now, ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... rose ghostly out of that phantom sea. Great and shadowy and strange was the world that night, no one seemed abroad; I and my little cracked voice drifted solitary through the silent mysteries. Sometimes I argued as I have told, sometimes I tumbled along in moody vacuity, sometimes my torment was vivid ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... everybody else did. The youngest of the three princesses was named Mademoiselle d'Alencon. With a trifle more wit and dash, she could have maintained her position at Court, where so charming a face as hers was fitted to make its mark; but her fine dark eyes did but express indifference and vacuity, seemingly unconscious of the pleasure to be got in this world when one is young, good-looking, shapely, a princess of the blood, and cousin german of ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... of overhearing furnished Eustacia with visions enough to fill the whole blank afternoon. Such sudden alternations from mental vacuity do sometimes occur thus quietly. She could never have believed in the morning that her colourless inner world would before night become as animated as water under a microscope, and that without the arrival of a single visitor. ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... alternations of hope and fear, and steals away the night and day from every other pleasure or employment, is regarded by them whose passions time has extinguished, as an amusement, which can properly raise neither joy nor sorrow, and, though it may be suffered to fill the vacuity of an idle moment, should always give way to prudence ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... we that strait have threaded. But when free We came and open, where the mount above One solid mass retires, I spent, with toil, And both, uncertain of the way, we stood, Upon a plain more lonesome, than the roads That traverse desert wilds. From whence the brink Borders upon vacuity, to foot Of the steep bank, that rises still, the space Had measur'd thrice the stature of a man: And, distant as mine eye could wing its flight, To leftward now and now to right dispatch'd, That cornice equal in ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... of Vittorio Alfieri had been strangely vacant, dreary, one might almost say intellectually and morally sordid; and the strangest, the dreariest circumstance about them was exactly that this vacuity, this dreariness, this total want of all that can make the life of a boy and of a young man pleasant to our fancy or attractive to our sympathy, did not in the least depend upon any harshness or stinginess of fate. Indeed, perhaps, no man had ever prepared for him an easier existence; no man had ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... with the preceding. To maintain purity, the mind must be occupied. If left without occupation, the vacuity is quickly filled with unchaste thoughts. Nothing can be worse for a child than to be reared in idleness. His morals will be certain to suffer. Incessant mental occupation is the only safeguard against unchastity. Those worthless ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... of wandering, which spreads its contagion from valley to valley, deserves to be sought with great diligence. In more fruitful countries, the removal of one only makes room for the succession of another: but in the Hebrides, the loss of an inhabitant leaves a lasting vacuity; for nobody born in any other parts of the world will choose this country for his residence, and an Island once depopulated will remain a desert, as long as the present facility of travel gives every one, who is discontented ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... to so late a period and to the last was so full of usefulness, that it almost seemed a permanent part of the organization and the active movement of society here. His departure has left a sad vacuity in the framework which he helped to uphold and adorn. It is as if one of the columns which support a massive building had been suddenly taken away; the sight of the space which it once occupied troubles us, and the mind wearies itself in the unavailing ...
— A Discourse on the Life, Character and Writings of Gulian Crommelin - Verplanck • William Cullen Bryant
... writings are simply to be read. And so the hearers sit steeped in mist and wrapped in placidity, returning to their work rested and refreshed, without being influenced in any way, save by the soothing calm of forceful fog and mental vacuity. ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... his brain before middle age gave signs of disease. As any other creature would, when overdriven for years it revolted, and failed in its work now and then. Night after night he lay sleepless, conscious only of a dull vacuity at the base of the brain; and by day, when some crisis demanded his most vigilant, keenest thought, thought suddenly blurred into momentary stupor. Any man who overworks his brain will understand how it was with him, and why, for physical reasons, this glimpse of absolute ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... hydrostatic paradox in which the motion of solids up a spout is balanced by a very slender column of the liquidating medium. The once goodly row of quartos looks now like a set of mineral teeth that have essayed too closely to simulate Nature by assaulting a Boston cracker; and the intervals of vacuity among the books, as among the incisors, deprive the owner of his accustomed glibness in pronouncing himself on certain topics. Among the missing volumes is one of those in M, and accordingly our miss-information [A] on all subjects from Mabinogion to Mustard is not to be entirely relied ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... small draper's shop. The parents were young people of twenty-five to thirty-five. He wore a black shiny frock coat—an "Albert" in America?—a high hat, little side whiskers and dark moustache and a look of amiable vacuity. His wife was oddly bedizened in black satin, with a wide spreading hat, not ill-looking, simply unmeaning. I fancy that she had at times, not too often, "a temper of her own." And the very small baby sat upon her knee. The party was probably going forth to spend the Sunday ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... fishes are absorbed in the sea; they wish for nothing, and, having nothing, they possess all things. This celestial light satiates the hunger of the soul; every desire is precluded; and they have a fulness of joy which sets them above all that mortals seek with such restless ardor, to fill the vacuity that aches forever in their breast. All the delightful objects that surround them are disregarded; for their felicity springs up within, and, being perfect, can derive nothing from without. So the gods, satiated with nectar and ambrosia, disdain, as gross and impure, ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... ours in Edinburgh, a Mrs. A——, I wish to say a word. She was a very singular woman; not perhaps in being tolerably ignorant and silly, with an unmeaning face and a foolish, commonplace manner, an average specimen of vacuity of mind and vapidity of conversation, but undoubtedly singular in that she combined with these not un-frequent human conditions a most rare gift of musical and poetical interpretation—a gift so peculiar that when she sang she literally seemed inspired, taken possession of, by some ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... the absence of the petty news and small talk of which the ex-peruquier was a faithful reporter, and which habit had made as necessary to the Antiquary as his occasional pinch of snuff, although he held, or affected to hold, both to be of the same intrinsic value. The feeling of vacuity peculiar to such a deprivation, was alleviated by the appearance of old Ochiltree, sauntering beside the clipped yew and holly hedges, with the air of a person quite at home. Indeed, so familiar had he been of late, that even Juno did ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... Manufactures" to Lewis the Fifteenth, above which is a delicate headpiece by M. Charles-Nicolas Cochin (the greatest of the family), where a couple of that artist's well-nourished amorini, insecurely attached to festoons, distribute palms and laurels in vacuity under a coroneted oval displaying fishes. For Monsieur Abel-Francois Poisson, Marquis de Marigny et de Menars, was the younger brother of Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, the celebrated Marquise de Pompadour. Cochin's ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... poetry with his philosophy. His infernal and celestial powers are sometimes pure spirit, and sometimes animated body. When Satan walks with his lance upon the "burning marl," he has a body; when, in his passage between hell and the new world, he is in danger of sinking in the vacuity, and is supported by a gust of rising vapours, he has a body; when he animates the toad, he seems to be mere spirit, that can penetrate matter at pleasure; when he starts "up in his own shape," he has, at least, a determined form; and, when he is brought before ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... of trees sweep the sky clean; Sweep the house fronts, And leave them bleak in sleep. High up the empty moon Spills her vacuity. ...
— Precipitations • Evelyn Scott
... Own sang lustily with a dogged enjoyment that made little of the words. Some of them assumed a vacuity to counteract the sentiment, but most of the sheepish countenances expressed that the tune was the thing, one or two with a smile of jovial cynicism, and kept time with their feet. Through the medley of voices—everybody ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... by the best informed. But though such observations escaped him, he never developed them. His concise remarks attracted no attention until time proved their truth. His good sense, full of acuteness, had early persuaded him of the perfect vacuity of the greater part of political orations, of theological discussions, of philosophic digressions. He began early to practice the favorite maxim of a man of great distinction, whom we have often heard repeat a remark dictated by the misanthropic wisdom of age, which was then startling ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... has gone out. To be sure, it is a shocking thing, blowing smoke out of our mouths into other people's mouths, eyes, and noses, and having the same thing done to us. Yet I cannot account, why a thing which requires so little exertion, and yet preserves the mind from total vacuity, should have gone out. Every man has something by which he calms himself: beating with his feet, or so. [Footnote: Dr Johnson used to practice this himself very much.] I remember when people in England changed ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... madness, and self-contempt, George Aspel stood holding on to the railings and glaring into vacuity. Recovering himself he staggered home and went ...
— Post Haste • R.M. Ballantyne
... these threads are snapped and the balance is disturbed we are drawn into strange pathways, and our whole lives may be changed through the operation of what seems a most trivial case. In Bob's case the cause approached, all unheralded, in the person of Mr. Richard Cady, a youth whose magnificent vacuity of purpose was the envy of his friends. Comet-like, he was destined to appear, flash brightly, then disappear below the horizon of this tale. Mr. Cady greeted Bob with listless enthusiasm, teetering the while upon his cane like ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... proceeded another long cilium, so delicate as to be discernible only by the use of the highest powers and careful management of the light. In the centre of the pear-shaped body a clear round space could occasionally be discerned, but not always; and careful watching showed that this clear vacuity appeared gradually, and then shut up and disappeared suddenly, at regular intervals. Such a structure is of common occurrence among the lowest plants and animals, and is known as ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... traveller became quite interested in sounding the immense vacuity of my dulness to its ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... are in sea and shore! How one dwells on their simplicity, even vacuity! What is it in us, arous'd by those indirections and directions? That spread of waves and gray-white beach, salt, monotonous, senseless—such an entire absence of art, books, talk, elegance—so indescribably comforting, even this ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... scene so perfectly brings out the absolute vacuity of the British mind when one can get it free from the replenishing influences of the daily paper. Alpine talk is the lowest variety of conversation, as the common run of Alpine writing is the lowest form of literature. It is in fact ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... yourself by works instead o' leanin' onto Him! Find Him, sez you! Git Him, sez you! Works is vain. Glory! glory!" he continued, with fluent vacuity and wandering, dull, ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte
... ran a ceaseless paean of thanksgiving for her timely deliverance from the trammels which she so well knew enshackled these glittering birds of paradise. With it mingled a great, consuming desire, a soul-longing to pour into the vacuity of high society the leaven of her own pure thought. In particular did her boundless love now go out to that gigantic figure whose ideals of life this sumptuous display of material wealth and power expressed. Why was he doing this? What ulterior motive had he? ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... it is not needful here to enquire. The deeper question, into which this finally merges, is, whether any one of these is even conceivable in the true sense of the word." He shows that, since the mind refuses to accept the transformation of absolute vacuity into the existent, the theory of self-creation forces us back to a potential Universe whose self-creation was transition to an actual Universe, and that then, we must explain the existence of the potential Universe and that, similarly, creation by an external agency demands that we ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... strong Tahiti rum. Far back in his eyes, away beyond the visible organs, there came a gleam of greater consciousness, a realization of life around him. His mouth, like a rent in an old, battered purse, gaped, and though no teeth were there, the vacuity seemed ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... serve to recreate the mind, contributes to keep up this indulgence, if indulgence it may be called when nothing higher occupies the mind, and reader as well as writer find their chief interest therein. This is because vulgar natures, if overstrained, can only be refreshed by vacuity; and even a higher intelligence, when not sustained by a proportional culture, can only rest from its work amidst sensuous enjoyments, from which ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... There remains in my mind the dreary sense of a long, long drive to the uttermost bounds of the South End at Boston, where he went to call upon some obscure person whose claim stretched in a lengthening chain from his early days in Missouri—a most inadequate person, in whose vacuity the gloom of the dull day deepened till it was almost too deep for tears. He bore the ordeal with grim heroism, and silently smoked away the sense of it, as we drove back to Cambridge, in his slippered feet, sombrely ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... was opened, Smiles caught sight of the child sitting motionless on a stool near the fireplace. Her lips were parted and in her eyes was an odd look of semi-vacuity. ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... of her son (dated March 30, 1776) he thus refers to the loss of his wife:—'I know that a whole system of hopes, and designs, and expectations is swept away at once, and nothing left but bottomless vacuity. What you feel I have felt, and hope that your disquiet will be shorter than mine.' Piozzi Letters, i. 310. In a letter to Mr. Elphinston, who had just lost his wife, written on July 27, 1778, he repeats ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... comfortably down, "let me put myself a little more on an equal footing with you before I undertake to reply. Half that number of eggs will be sufficient for an unmarried man, and then we'll talk. They're all very well, as well as I can recollect after the shaking my total vacuity has had this morning. I came over by the first boat, and the sea, the sea has made me love mother earth, and ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... to a lady. He was generally last at breakfast, but one morning happened to be first and waited some time alone; when afterwards twitted by Mrs. Thrale with irregularity, he replied, "Madam, I do not like to come down to vacuity." ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... vacuity. It probably means the orb or boundary of the earth.—10. is the first boundary, [Hebrew: tchwm], Tekum, [Greek: Deka], Decem, "terminus." Something more yet remains to be said, I think, on the names ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 51, October 19, 1850 • Various
... the Elderly Female, who is sitting smiling with vacuity beneath the bell-pull). So it is you who have sounded the alarm! What is it ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... chief—as if he had forgotten all about it already—sat with a stolid face amongst his silent followers, leaning back squarely in his chair, his hands on the arms of his seat, his knees apart, his big blood-shot eyes blinking solemnly, as if dazzled by the noble vacuity of his thoughts. ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad
... began to blow the covered fire on the hearth, where he had not long before "boiled his kettle" for his tea. Then closing the door, he lighted a candle, and Mary looking about her could scarcely believe the change that had come upon the miserable vacuity. Joseph sat down upon his anvil, and begged to know where she had just been, and how far she had run from the rascal. When he had learned something of the peculiar relations in which Mary stood to the family ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... promises of everlasting love. "In them hath He set a tabernacle for the sun;" whose burning ball, which, without the firmament, would be seen but as an intolerable and scorching circle in the blackness of vacuity, is by that firmament surrounded with gorgeous service, and tempered by mediatorial ministries: by the firmament of clouds the temple is built, for his presence to fill with light at noon; by the firmament of clouds the purple veil is closed at evening, round the sanctuary of his rest; by the ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... we admit them to the Alphabet, but afterwards debar them from Books? Do we fear their rashness? The more we occupy their thoughts, the less room will there be in them for rashness, which springs generally from vacuity of mind." Some slight limitations as to the reading proper for young women are appended, but with a hint that the same limitations would be good for youth of the other sex; and there is a bold quotation of the Scriptural text (1 Tim. ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... difficulty of accounting for time, which is effected on the modern stage by dropping a curtain, the judgment and great genius of the ancients supplied music and measured motion, and with the lyric ode filled up the vacuity. In the story of the Agamemnon of AEschylus, the capture of Troy is supposed to be announced by a fire lighted on the Asiatic shore, and the transmission of the signal by successive beacons to Mycenae. The signal is first seen at the 21st line, and the herald from Troy itself enters ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... these glances sat apparently lost in vacuity, or patiently waiting the end of the services,—when all at once, during the hymn, he sprang to his feet; at the same moment two or three beside him felt as if they had experienced an electric shock. What was it? A voice joined ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... I did once make one of the nigger men let it down so I could look in it; but, Lord, child, I saw nothing but a great, black, deep vacuity, without bottom or sides. It put such a horror over me that I have never looked down there since, and ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... Graydon, however, made a sketch which showed at one point a complete break in the Corona so that from the very edge of the Moon outwards into space, there was a long and narrow black space showing nothing but a vacuity. If this was really the condition of things, such a break in the ...
— The Story of Eclipses • George Chambers
... of man. But they read their scriptures differently from us who think that this state of things was the actual beginning. There is no necessary connexion between the first verse of Genesis and the succeeding. The beginning of the existence of matter, and the state of vacuity and darkness whence the present order of things emerged, may have been, so far as the text is concerned, and were, as we know from appearances, separated from ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... whole or in part, was the certain prefigurement to myself, more or less distinct, of an opulent, genial and sunny mind, but misdirected, disappointed, experienced in misery;—nay crude and hasty; mistaking for a solid outcome from its woes what was only to me a gilded vacuity. The hero an ardent youth, representing Sterling himself, plunges into life such as we now have it in these anarchic times, with the radical, utilitarian, or mutinous heathen theory, which is the readiest for inquiring souls; finds, by various ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... are irregular, but pleasing; the nose perhaps a little short, and the mouth a little womanish; his address is excellent, and he can express himself with point. But to pierce below these externals is to come on a vacuity of any sterling quality, a deliquescence of the moral nature, a frivolity and inconsequence of purpose that mark the nearly perfect fruit of a decadent age. He has a worthless smattering of many subjects, but a grasp of none. 'I soon ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... communist, and is sure he will go to hell (if there be such an excellent institution) for the luxury in which he lives? And can you believe that, though it is gaily expressed, the thought is hag and skeleton in every moment of vacuity or depression? Can you conceive how profoundly I am irritated by the opposite affectation to my own, when I see strong men and rich men bleating about their sorrows and the burthen of life, in a world full of 'cancerous paupers,' and poor sick children, and the fatally bereaved, ay, and ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... art: but they had open eyes and minds, and could discern that some things were good and other bad—that some things they liked, and others they hated. They hated the lack of ideas in art, and the lack of character; the silliness and vacuity which belong to the one, the flimsiness and make-believe which result from the other. They hated those forms of execution which are merely smooth and prettyish, and those which, pretending to mastery, are nothing better than slovenly and slapdash, or what ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... like walking to make an empty stomach aware of its vacuity. By the way, queer article that Clegg fellow of yours—face like a mask! Where ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... mercy. But for his deafness I am sure he would long since have left the humble rank of gunner far beneath him, and the Staff might have gained a brilliant strategist. In addition to dulness of hearing, Steggles is endowed—I should indeed be ungrateful to use the word afflicted—with a vacuity of expression which puts rivals or antagonists off their guard, and doubles his value during the vicissitudes of active service. What would be handicaps to ordinary men Steggles turns to the advantage of himself, Sapphira my ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 10, 1917 • Various
... than usual, and my cabinet being lighted with but a loophole of a window, I was at last obliged to desist from this diversion (such as it was), and pass the rest of my time of waiting in a very burthensome vacuity. The sound of people talking in a near chamber, the pleasant note of a harpsichord, and once the voice of a lady singing, bore me a kind ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 11 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... straw-coloured wine in quaint carafes, the rich stews served in grey earthenware dishes streaked with blue, the dancing, the caressing, the singular absence of all elderly women, strikes on the mind with a quite peculiar sense of boredom and vacuity, because Morris seems to have eliminated so many sources of human interest, and to have conformed every one to a type, which is refreshing enough as a contrast, but very tiresome in the mass. It will ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the presence of one or of two series of teeth in the lower jaw, the structure of the tentacle (representing the so-called "balancers" of Urodele larvae) on the side of the snout, and the presence or absence of a vacuity between the parietal and squamosal bones of the skull. Of these twenty-one genera six are peculiar to tropical Africa, one to the Seychelles, four to south-eastern Asia, eight to Central and South America, one occurs in both continental Africa ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... hardly comprehend the dreadful revelation. And, besides, it must be said, that for some moments his reason had deserted him; at each moment his ideas became more obscure; then he fell into that vacuity of thought which is to the mind what night is to the sight: formidable symptoms of mental alienation. Yet Morel answered, in a quick, dull, and a mournful tone, "Oh! yes, it is very ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... hopes, dismayed by the sound of bells pealing out the arrival of Pedrito Montero, Sotillo had spent the morning in battling with his thoughts; a contest to which he was unequal, from the vacuity of his mind and the violence of his passions. Disappointment, greed, anger, and fear made a tumult, in the colonel's breast louder than the din of bells in the town. Nothing he had planned had come to pass. Neither Sulaco nor the ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... death of her son (dated March 30, 1776) he thus refers to the loss of his wife:—'I know that a whole system of hopes, and designs, and expectations is swept away at once, and nothing left but bottomless vacuity. What you feel I have felt, and hope that your disquiet will be shorter than mine.' Piozzi Letters, i. 310. In a letter to Mr. Elphinston, who had just lost his wife, written on July 27, 1778, he repeats the same thought:—'A loss such as yours lacerates ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... not suppress some sighs, and in the mean time Aunt Melissa stepped into the waiting-room, which opened on the farther side upon the water, and sat contentedly down on one of the benches; the rest, from sheer vacuity and irresolution, followed, and thus, without debate, it was settled that they should wait there till the boat left. The agent, who was a kind man, did what he could to alleviate the situation: he gave them each the advertisement ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... renewed by a second reading in whole or in part, was the certain prefigurement to myself, more or less distinct, of an opulent, genial and sunny mind, but misdirected, disappointed, experienced in misery;—nay crude and hasty; mistaking for a solid outcome from its woes what was only to me a gilded vacuity. The hero an ardent youth, representing Sterling himself, plunges into life such as we now have it in these anarchic times, with the radical, utilitarian, or mutinous heathen theory, which is the ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... He must not look at her professionally. Despair imparted to his countenance a look of stony vacuity which sat oddly ...
— Geoffrey Strong • Laura E. Richards
... to him that nearly all the people he met were couples, arm-in-arm. And he suddenly thought of Florence, the clog-dancer. He had scarcely thought of her for months. The complexity of the interests of life, and the interweaving of its moods, fatigued his mind into an agreeably grave vacuity. ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... angels, good and bad, the fall of man, and many other such matters, are due quite as much to Milton as to any other authority, his opinion must not be lightly disregarded. But though, when Milton's Satan 'meets a vast vacuity' where his wings are of no ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... bitter rebellion. Everywhere was a scramble for office—everywhere a pouring into the city from the farms and villages. Why was it? Was he not a part of the movement as well as these girls? Did it not all spring from the barrenness and vacuity of rural life? ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... is this complex consciousness which has slowly evolved out of infantine vacuity—consciousness which, in other shapes, is manifested by animate beings at large—consciousness which, during the development of every creature, makes its appearance out of what seems unconscious matter; suggesting ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... but I could not; I tried to eat, but my appetite was gone. I sat looking at the ocean as it rolled wave after wave, sometimes wondering whether it would ever bring a fellow-creature to join me; at others I sat, and for hours, in perfect vacuity of thought. The evening closed in, it was dark, and I still remained seated where I was. At last I returned to my bed, almost broken-hearted; but fortunately I was soon asleep, ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Frederick Marryat
... it seemed to him—and usually unjustly—as if people were nudging each other; hands, pointing out-stretched fingers at him, appeared to grow from every eye. At home he found nothing but desolation, vacuity, sorrow, and a child, who constantly tore open the burning, gnawing wounds in his heart. Ulrich must forget "the viper," and he sternly forbade him to speak of his mother; but not a day passed on which he would not fain have done ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... from any thing, a total apathy being the chief ingredient of his character: he must, upon no account, sustain a conversation with any spirit, lest he should appear, to his utter disgrace, interested in what is said: and when he is quite tired of his existence, from a total vacuity of ideas, he must affect a look of absence, and pretend, on the sudden, to ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... puerile stories, which a man of sense will inevitably reject as too trivial for his gravity or too fantastical for his faith. That nation is happy, according to a common adage, which furnishes little business to the historian; for such a vacuity in facts argues a condition of perfect peace and silent prosperity. That childhood is happy, or may generally be presumed such, which has furnished few records of external experience, little that has ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... forgotten it, alas! Lost in eternity's lumber room? Will the wave of his Spirit never pass Over it through the insensate gloom? It lies alone in its lifeless world, As a frozen bud on the earth lies curled; Sightless and soundless, without a cry, On the flat of its own vacuity. ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... 0. Nothing; vacuity. It probably means the orb or boundary of the earth.—10. is the first boundary, [Hebrew: tchwm], Tekum, [Greek: Deka], Decem, "terminus." Something more yet remains to be said, I think, on the names of the letters. Cf. "Table of Alphabets" in Gesenius, Lex., ed. Tregelles, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 51, October 19, 1850 • Various
... possess all things. This celestial light satiates the hunger of the soul; every desire is precluded; and they have a fulness of joy which sets them above all that mortals seek with such restless ardor, to fill the vacuity that aches forever in their breast. All the delightful objects that surround them are disregarded; for their felicity springs up within, and, being perfect, can derive nothing from without. So the gods, satiated with nectar and ambrosia, disdain, as gross and impure, all the dainties of the ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... days, in an atmosphere perpetually tremulous with echoes and implications, it was restful and fortifying merely to walk into the big blank area of Miss Painter's mind, so vacuous for all its accumulated items, so echoless for all its vacuity. ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... checks his breath, Are numbed, till consciousness seems sunk in death; Within himself, with eye of truth, he sees The All-soul, free from all activities. May His, may Shiva's meditation be Your strong defense; on the Great Self thinks he, Knowing full well the world's vacuity. 1 ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka
... life. Even the mineral kingdom is supposed to be swayed by the moon; for in Scotland, Martin says, "The natives told me, that the rock on the east side of Harries, in the Sound of Island Glass, hath a vacuity near the front, on the north-west side of the Sound; in which they say there is a stone that they call the Lunar Stone, which advances and retires according to the increase and decrease of the moon." [323] An ancient instance of belief in lunar influence upon ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... we are drawn into strange pathways, and our whole lives may be changed through the operation of what seems a most trivial case. In Bob's case the cause approached, all unheralded, in the person of Mr. Richard Cady, a youth whose magnificent vacuity of purpose was the envy of his friends. Comet-like, he was destined to appear, flash brightly, then disappear below the horizon of this tale. Mr. Cady greeted Bob with listless enthusiasm, teetering the while upon his cane like a ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... could not but be displeasing to a lady. He was generally last at breakfast, but one morning happened to be first and waited some time alone; when afterwards twitted by Mrs. Thrale with irregularity, he replied, "Madam, I do not like to come down to vacuity." ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... disgusted with the 'revel.' He had expected, as I said before, at least to hear something of pastoral sentiment, and of genial frolicsome humour; to see some innocent, simple enjoyment: but instead, what had he seen but vanity, jealousy, hoggish sensuality, dull vacuity? drudges struggling for one night to forget their drudgery. And yet withal, those songs, and the effect which they produced, showed that in these poor creatures, too, lay the germs of pathos, taste, melody, soft and noble affections. 'What right have we,' thought he, 'to hinder ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... "Nothing like walking to make an empty stomach aware of its vacuity. By the way, queer article that Clegg fellow of yours—face like a mask! Where did you ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... repeats it. He now loses his superhuman power, i. e., the power of absolute spiritual integrity, and becomes subject to the limitations of earth, like a common man. He can no longer lead Artus and his court, who perish of their own spiritual vacuity. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... and I am tired of white glare and dust. The trees have slept all day. They have hardly turned a leaf. All day the sky was without a flaw, and the summer silence outside the town, where the dry road goes between hedges of arid prickly pears, was not reticence but vacuity. But I sail tonight, and so the barometer is falling, and I do not know where Celestine will take me. I do not care where I go with one whose godparents looked at ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... suspension of judgment, extending till it fills heaven and earth. We no longer discuss opinions even; the most we can attain to is an attitude of mind. In view of the vast variety of phases in which even man's great ideas have been held, a sense of indifference among them, a vacuity in all, grows up. Pilate's question, 'What ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... should we admit them to the Alphabet, but afterwards debar them from Books? Do we fear their rashness? The more we occupy their thoughts, the less room will there be in them for rashness, which springs generally from vacuity of mind." Some slight limitations as to the reading proper for young women are appended, but with a hint that the same limitations would be good for youth of the other sex; and there is a bold quotation of the Scriptural text (1 Tim. ii. 12),"I suffer not a woman to teach," and ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... have threaded. But when free We came and open, where the mount above One solid mass retires, I spent, with toil, And both, uncertain of the way, we stood, Upon a plain more lonesome, than the roads That traverse desert wilds. From whence the brink Borders upon vacuity, to foot Of the steep bank, that rises still, the space Had measur'd thrice the stature of a man: And, distant as mine eye could wing its flight, To leftward now and now to right dispatch'd, That cornice equal in extent appear'd. Not yet our ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... the two ruffians, lethargic after an enormous breakfast, lay about idly in the shade and smoked. As I listened to their lazy, fragmentary conversation vast gulfs of mental vacuity seemed to open before me. I wondered whether after all wicked people were just stupid people—and then I thought of Aunt Jane—who ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... caught sight of at all. She had been hiding from him even in his presence. In every aspect she was an anger. But she could talk to the fellow with her ... a skinny whipper-snapper, whom the breath of a man could shred into remote, eyeless vacuity. Was this man another insult? Did she not even wait to bury her dead? Pah! she was not value for his thought. A girl so lightly facile might be blown from here to there and she would scarcely notice the difference. Here and there were the same ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... beyond the reach of humanity, the necessary abstraction enlarged and stimulated his reasoning powers. But the penalty was to be paid. For with terrible recoil from its tension his mind contracted to far less than normal limits. Then came a listless vacuity, a tawdry dreaminess. And this poor minister, who flattered himself that he had outgrown every graceful and touching form with which human affection or human infirmity had clothed the Christian idea, stumbled amid the rubbish of an effete heathenism, with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... tall, she seemed to tower up and over one's personality. One had no mind of her own, but one said what one thought Miss Lizzie wanted her to say. Sometimes one got it wrong. Then Miss Lizzie's cold up-and-down survey smote one into a condition something akin to vacuity, until Miss ...
— Emmy Lou - Her Book and Heart • George Madden Martin
... refer literature to the standards of life, common-sense will at once decide which quality should count heaviest in your esteem. You will be in no danger of weighing a mere maladroitness of manner against a fine trait of character, or of letting a graceful deportment blind you to a fundamental vacuity. When in doubt, ignore style, and think of the matter as you ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... of necessity always clean. I don't know how much fancy there was in this; but there is no fancy in saying that the lassitude of tired-out operatives, and the languor of imaginative natures in their periods of collapse, and the vacuity of minds untrained to labor and discipline, fit the soul and body for the germination of the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... force he had no time to measure, and hurled him across the room. He staggered at the door, and his head coming noisily in contact with it, he slipped down into a sitting posture with an expression suddenly changed from ferocity to a complete vacuity and indifference. ...
— Young Mr. Barter's Repentance - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... his own distresses, to estimate the comparative happiness of others. Knowledge is certainly one of the means of pleasure, as is confessed by the natural desire which every mind feels of increasing its ideas. Ignorance is mere privation, by which nothing can be produced; it is a vacuity, in which the soul sits motionless and torpid, for want of attraction; and, without knowing why, we always rejoice when we learn, and grieve when we forget. I am, therefore, inclined to conclude, that, if nothing counteracts the natural consequence ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... discord, vacuity; while the people were goaded to the absurd charge, that some of its members were traitors! But the great diplomat has graven the truth, that an error may be worse than a crime; and the errors of the Confederate Congress—from alpha to omega—were born of weakness and feeble ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... that period a man, if he showed fitness for it, would be placed in association during his working hours, and in his cell during the remainder of the day. In this way his social instincts would not be so completely stifled as they are at present; he would not be so entirely left to the vacuity of his own mind; he would not be so readily led to the indulgence of disgusting vices ruinous to body and mind. In countries where prisons are on a large scale such a system as this might easily be adopted, and it would, if properly managed, be productive of beneficial results. ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison
... the last of which was the thirteen years' siege of Tyre, Antiq. B. XI. ch. 11., where yet the Old Latin has but three years and ten months: yet were his actions before so remarkable, both in sacred and profane authors, that a vacuity of eight years at the least, at the latter end of his reign, must be allowed to agree very well with Daniel's accounts; that after a seven years' brutal life, he might return to his reason, and to the exercise of his royal authority, for one ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... backwards, and in some species so elegantly formed as to take the shape of a lyre on looking at them full in front. The females of some have smaller, smoother horns, but others are hornless. The skull has an anteorbital vacuity, with a small anteorbital fossa. The auditory bullae are large; "eye-pits small; groin-pits distinct; large feet-pits in all feet; knees tufted" (Jerdon). The face has a white band running from the outer side of the ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... furrowed. Of his personal appearance, even of cleanliness, he became neglectful, and occasionally it happened that he lay in bed all through the morning, reading, dozing, or in a state of mental vacuity. ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... this intercourse the speaker should let his soul beam from his eye. Nor should he fail to look at his hearers, if he would have his hearers look at him. Among the faults to be avoided in the management of the eye, Dr. Porter notices particularly that unmeaning look which the eye "bent on vacuity" has, resembling the inexpressive glare of the glass eye of a wax figure; that indefinite sweep of the eye which ranges from one side to the other of an assembly, resting nowhere; and that tremulous, roving cast of the eye, and winking of the ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... he told them off, however, the old sense of hollowness was upon him again. His life there reminded him of a gaudy drop-scene, let down before an empty stage; a painted sham, with darkness and vacuity behind. At bottom, none of these distinctions and successes meant anything to him; not a scrap of mental pabulum could be got from them: rather would he have chosen to be poor and a nobody among people whose thoughts flew to meet his half-way. And there was also ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... bold misrepresentation adopted by Professor Whitney, Professor Steinthal calls him—"That vain man who only wants to be named and praised;" "that horrible humbug;" "that scolding flirt;" "that tricky attorney;" "wherever I read him, hollow vacuity yawns in my face; arrogant vanity grins at me." Surely, mere words can go no further—we must expect to hear of tomahawk and bowie-knife next. Scholars who object to the use of such weapons, whether for offensive or defensive purposes, can do nothing but what I have done for years—remain ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... a pair of eyes in which unhealthy intelligence seemed to struggle in undetermined battle with utter vacuity; "why should you suppose that anything is ...
— When William Came • Saki
... harvest of berries in autumn, why, he is come too late, that is all; and if one fine day he finds he can no longer be gay and laugh all over his face in delight of life, 'tis because he is old, no doubt; blame him not for that! And there can be no doubt that it requires a certain vacuity of mind to go about feeling permanently contented with oneself and all else. But we have all our softer moments. A prisoner is being driven to the scaffold in a cart. A nail in the seat irks him; he shifts aside a little, and feels more ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun
... indecently nudged at every apology of a jolt; in short, a penthouse of ill-humour; twelve 'all full' people; whiskerandi, gentle maidens, wives, and 'live widders,' ranged with solemn regularity like coffins in a vault. All fix their eyes where their minds are, on vacuity, and try to be for the time present, what they seem to be, as stupid as the devil, as if they dreaded some sympathetic contact, revealing bank-frauds and transactions in stocks. Who ever saw a smile in an omnibus, even when court-plasters ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... The head was nearly bald. A long cloak, glistening with grease stains, swathed his limbs and portly belly, on which one suspected multitudinous wrinkles of fat. Two filmy lidless eyes, bulging on a level with his forehead, stared into vacuity; his snub nose grew out of a flattened face whose pallor was accentuated by the reflection of the glittering leaves—it looked faded and sodden, like blotting-paper that has been left out all night in the rain. Sporadic greenish-grey ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... real religion; and let children consider, that if the fear of God do not possess their own breasts, and influence their matrimonial choice, the delirium of pleasure will soon be past, and a sense of inexpressible vacuity be left behind. The world is a gay deceiver, and life a fleeting dream; the mists of illusion which gather over the morning of existence, gradually disappear as the day advances; and this imagined scene of ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... have German bureaucracy in its full flower and odor," remarked Anderson as he recounted the affair to Kirtley. "It flourishes to a great extent by exaggerating mole hills into mountains with officious vacuity. It is so large that there is not enough serious work for it. So something often must be found to do. It is a civil army radiating the glory of the Kaiser. The more extensive it is, the more entrenched ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... sort of books I was going to write. But as soon as I asked myself the question, and tried to discover some subjects to which I could impart a philosophical significance of infinite value, my mind would stop like a clock, I would see before me vacuity, nothing, would feel either that I was wholly devoid of talent, or that, perhaps, a malady of the brain was hindering its development. Sometimes I would depend upon my father's arranging everything for me. He was so powerful, in such favour with the people who 'really counted,' ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... ladies sat down together like watchers, in that silence and vacuity of mind which come after an exhaustive struggle ending in the recognition of the inevitable; a torpor of thought, a stupefaction of feeling, a purely negative state of joylessness sequent to the positive state of anguish. They were now both hungry, but in want of ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... series of papers. The "Tatler's" personality was Isaac Bickerstaff, Physician and Astrologer; as to years, just over the grand climacteric, sixty-three, mystical multiple of nine and seven; dispensing counsel from his lodgings at Shire Lane, and seeking occasional rest in the vacuity of thought proper to his ...
— Isaac Bickerstaff • Richard Steele
... first place, no scene so perfectly brings out the absolute vacuity of the British mind when one can get it free from the replenishing influences of the daily paper. Alpine talk is the lowest variety of conversation, as the common run of Alpine writing is the lowest form of literature. It is in fact simply drawing-room talk as drawing-room talk would be if ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... of things, but they cannot change our nature—they may create an universal taste for literature, but they will never unite it with habits of industry; and until they prove how men are to live without labour, they have no right to banish the chearful vacuity which usually accompanies it, by substituting reflections to make it irksome, and propensities ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... covered fire on the hearth, where he had not long before "boiled his kettle" for his tea. Then closing the door, he lighted a candle, and Mary looking about her could scarcely believe the change that had come upon the miserable vacuity. Joseph sat down upon his anvil, and begged to know where she had just been, and how far she had run from the rascal. When he had learned something of the peculiar relations in which Mary stood to the family at Durnmelling, he began to ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... the month was spent, alas! at Windsor, with what a dreary vacuity of heart and of pleasure I need not say. The only period of it in which my spirits could be commanded to revive was during two of the excursions in which Mr. Fairly was of the party; and the sight of him, calm, mild, nay cheerful, under such superior sorrows— —struck me with that sort of edifying ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... said to succeed as well with what is termed negative electricity in the theory of Dr. Franklin, as with what is termed positive electricity; but in that theory the negative electricity means a less quantity or total deprivation or vacuity of that fluid; now to condense negative electricity by lowering the suspended chain into the tankard ought to make it less negative; whereas in this experiment I am told it becomes more so, as appears by its stronger repulsion of cork balls suspended on silk strings, ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... there is a sense in which it is true to call liberty a negation. As a condition, though it may still be a negation, yet it may be indispensable for the production of certain positive results. The vacuity of an exhausted receiver is not a force, but it is the indispensable condition of certain positive operations. Liberty as a force may be as impotent as its opponents allege. This does not affect its value as a preliminary or accompanying condition. The absence ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... of Neocles, the Athenian, his philosophical sentiments being the same with those of Democritus, affirms that the principles of all being are bodies which are only perceptible by reason; they admit not of a vacuity, nor of any original, but being of a self-existence are eternal and incorruptible; they are not liable to any diminution, they are indestructible, nor is it possible for them to receive any transformation of parts, or admit of any alterations; of these reason is only the discoverer; they ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... border-edging, and the partial absence of eyebrows and eyelashes gave his face a sort of unfinished look. The expression natural to it was, I think, a low, vicious cunning; but his features and little green eyes were so rigidly disciplined that, as a rule, neither had any characteristic save utter vacuity. In his own line he was perfect. No commission that could be intrusted to him would draw from him a remark or a look of surprise. He executed precisely what he was told, and fulfilled the minutest duties of his station irreproachably, with a noiseless, feline activity. He was like the war-horse ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... here to enquire. The deeper question, into which this finally merges, is, whether any one of these is even conceivable in the true sense of the word." He shows that, since the mind refuses to accept the transformation of absolute vacuity into the existent, the theory of self-creation forces us back to a potential Universe whose self-creation was transition to an actual Universe, and that then, we must explain the existence of the potential Universe and that, similarly, ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... from the stunted development of the nasals, premaxillaries, and fore-part of the lower jaw, which is unusually {90} curved upwards to come into contact with the premaxillaries. The nasal bones are about one-third the ordinary length, but retain almost their normal breadth. The triangular vacuity is left between them, the frontal and lachrymal, which latter bone articulates with the premaxillary, and thus excludes the maxillary from any junction with the nasal." So that even the connexion of some of the bones is changed. Other differences might be added: thus the plane of ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... distance of time, operates upon the human feelings. I would not have you be gay in the presence of the distressed, because it would shock them; but you may be gay at a distance. Pain for the loss of a friend, or of a relation whom we love, is occasioned by the want which we feel. In time the vacuity is filled with something else; or sometimes the vacuity ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... thus the understanding takes repose In indolent vacuity of thought, And rests, and ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... was like a door closed in the face of their hope—that falling inflection, that blank of vacuity that settled over his face, and his whole drooping figure. He seemed to be only mutely awaiting their immediate departure to climb back again on his high stool. But Harry still leaned on the counter and grinned ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... returned, sitting comfortably down, "let me put myself a little more on an equal footing with you before I undertake to reply. Half that number of eggs will be sufficient for an unmarried man, and then we'll talk. They're all very well, as well as I can recollect after the shaking my total vacuity has had this morning. I came over by the first boat, and the sea, the sea has made me love mother earth, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... 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, ...
— The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi • Giacomo Leopardi
... attentive to every advantage, rushed with redoubled violence into this vacuity. The Britons, who could find no protection but in slavery, again implore the assistance of their former masters. At that time Aetius commanded the imperial forces in Gaul, and with the virtue and military skill of the ancient Romans ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... the low habit of imitation, a dulness and feebleness of understanding, an absence of intellectual resources, a vacuity of thought is the great inducement to the use of this, as of all other drugs, whether from the cigar-shop, or the snuff-shop, or the gin-shop, or the wine-cellar; a truth by no means the less certain, because it happens that men of the highest powers of mind are drawn ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, Number 490, Saturday, May 21, 1831 • Various
... years to reach us from the nearest fixed star. A sphere having the Sun at its centre and this nearest star at its circumference would have a diameter of upwards of fifty billions of miles; the volume of the orb when compared with the dimensions of this circular vacuity of space is as a small shot to a globe 900 miles in diameter. It has been estimated by Father Secchi that, if a comet when at aphelion were to arrive at a point midway between the Sun and the nearest fixed star, it would require ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... be decided on a scrutiny that the seat belonged to our hero, then he would enter upon his privilege in the following Session without any further trouble to himself at Tankerville. Should this not be the case,—then the abyss of absolute vacuity would be open before him. He would have to make some disposition of himself, but he would be absolutely without an idea as to the how or where. He was in possession of funds to support himself for a year or two; but after that, and even during that time, all would be ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... himself [another of the cited cases], is one of the elemental, stupendous facts of this modern world and of this universe. It cannot be glozed over or minimized away by all the treatises on God, and Love, and Being, helplessly existing in their haughty monumental vacuity. This is one of the simple irreducible elements of this world's life after millions of years of divine opportunity and twenty centuries of Christ. It is in the moral world like atoms or sub-atoms in the physical, primary, indestructible. And what it blazons ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... Can you imagine that he is a backslidden communist, and is sure he will go to hell (if there be such an excellent institution) for the luxury in which he lives? And can you believe that, though it is gaily expressed, the thought is hag and skeleton in every moment of vacuity or depression? Can you conceive how profoundly I am irritated by the opposite affectation to my own, when I see strong men and rich men bleating about their sorrows and the burthen of life, in a world full of 'cancerous paupers,' and poor sick children, and the fatally bereaved, ay, ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... despair, madness, and self-contempt, George Aspel stood holding on to the railings and glaring into vacuity. Recovering himself he staggered home and went ...
— Post Haste • R.M. Ballantyne
... one in a fog at sea. You fancy that out of that impenetrable mist may suddenly burst some great disaster or danger. Strange shapes appear to be forming themselves in the obscurity out of which they emerge, and the eye is wearied beyond expression with looking into a vacuity which continually promises to evolve ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... welfare is the highest business that any state can give its attention to. To recognise or to fail to recognise the value of the human soul in other nations, determines its real greatness and grandeur, or its self-complacent but essential vacuity. It is possible for a nation, through subtle delusions, to get such an attack of the big head that it bends over backwards, and it is liable, in this exposed position, to get a ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... If you cannot say a good word about a fellow-being, say none at all. Don't become a scandal-monger. We can forgive those who talk evil about us—they talk to hear themselves talk. The gossip germ is born of ignorance and vacuity and breeds best in idle minds. No one is influenced by the vaporings of a gossip, her words die in empty air. She injures herself only. The loquacious pest who brings to us the tales which the scandal-monger manufactures is the one who robs us of our peace and is unforgivable. ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... Eternal Death; through it too I look not 'up into the divine eye,' as Richter has it, 'but down into the bottomless eyesocket'—not up towards God, Heaven, and the Throne of Truth, but too truly down towards Falsity, Vacuity, and ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... solitudes. Now without a mate of any kind where am I?—that's to say, Where shall I be to-morrow?—where exert my rightful sway And the purifying strength of my emancipated mind? Can solitude be lifted up, vacuity refined? Calling, calling from the shadows in the rear of my Advance— From the Region of Unprogress in the Dark Domain of Chance— Long I heard the Unevolvable beseeching my return To share the degradation ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... upon him of what follows the reader must remember that it was an experience which came amid a deep sense of vacuity in life. The fairest products of [129] the earth seemed to be dropping to pieces, as if in men's very hands, around him. How real was their sorrow, and his! "His observation of life" had come to be like the constant ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... than to any other single factor for the success of his splendid pose of the thorough gentleman. Yet she did not realize what an utter fool he was, so clever had he been in the use of the art of discreet silence. Norman suspected him, but could not believe a human being capable of such fathomless vacuity as he found whenever he tried to ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... of man is not to be known by this test: a great fondness for music is a mark of great weakness, great vacuity of mind: not of hardness of heart; not of vice; not of downright folly; but of a want of capacity, or inclination, for sober thought. This is not always the case: accidental circumstances almost force the taste upon people: but, generally speaking, ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... soul flies out of bounds and away in airy liberty on these excursions to the vast unknown, and escapes at last victorious with the light through the darkness of conscious immortality, and the lamp in his hand of "the readiness is all." There is always a certain vacuity in the positive or realistic treatment of passion, in which it is confined to the area of mortality, and after a sultry strife delivered over to the mercy of its enemies. But the world cannot so beset and beleaguer the soul as to block ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... think she was not," said the girl, gravely. She looked hurt, as if she had been unfairly forced to the logic of her postulate, and Hewson was not altogether pleased with himself; but at least he had had his revenge in making her realize the man's vacuity. ...
— Questionable Shapes • William Dean Howells
... visited the ancient caverns of the Lebanon troglodytes in the cliffs overhanging the river of Wadi Kadeesha, and found nothing there but blind bats, and mosses, and dreary vacuity. No, not a vestage of the fossil is there, not a skull, not a shinbone. We have also inquired in the monasteries near the Cedars, and we were frankly told that no monk to-day fancies such a life. And if he did, he would not give his ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... seriousness, masked with a most winning gayety, a light irony, a fine scorn that was rather for herself than for others. She had thought herself out of all sympathy with her environment; she knew its falsehood, its vacuity, its hopelessness; but she necessarily remained in it and of it. She was as much at odds in it as I was, without my poor privilege of criticism and protest, for, as she said, she could not set herself up as a censor of things that she must keep ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... he, with a determined gaze fixed straight before him on vacuity, and with a desperate affectation of spontaneity in his tone—"Well, Madeline, mother and father have gone to Aunt Marcia's, I suppose to spend a ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... the vacuity and emptiness of Mademoiselle Gamard's mind, or stating to himself the pettiness of her ideas, the poor abbe perceived, unfortunately too late, the defects which she shared with all old maids, and those which were peculiar to herself. ...
— The Vicar of Tours • Honore de Balzac
... moment baby Marrot who had been sleeping when his father was brought in, became suddenly conscious of internal vacuity, and forthwith set up a lusty howl, whereupon Mrs Marrot pounced upon and throttled ...
— The Iron Horse • R.M. Ballantyne
... his cheeks flaccid, and declaring, with a voice thick with drink, that he disapproved of putting citizens to death without trial." [8] As to Piso, his best recommendation was a cunning gravity of demeanor, concealing mere vacuity. Piso knew nothing—neither law, nor rhetoric, nor war, nor his fellow-men. "His face was the face of some half-human brute." "He was like a negro, a thing [negotium] without sense or savor, a Cappadocian picked out of a drove in the ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... forward, and little of what transpired outside could be seen through the thick glass ports. The pirate ship loomed over them like a monstrous leech, its bolts sharply etched in black and white by the sunlight from their stern. Beyond that was only the velvety darkness—the absolute vacuity of space that carries no sound, refracts no light. A battle was raging out there, but of that nothing could be seen or heard in the salon. Only a dull, booming vibration through the flyer's hull, made by the rockets in a useless effort ...
— In the Orbit of Saturn • Roman Frederick Starzl
... is not the first; if it has a dependent existence, there must be a prior being on which it depends. If the First Cause is not eternal, then prior to this Ultimate Cause there was nothingness and vacuity, and pure nothing, by its own act, became something. But "Ex nihilo nihil" is a universal law of thought. To ask the question whether the First Cause be self-existent and eternal, is, in effect, to ask the question "who made God?" and this is not the question of an adult theologian, ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... destruction by its action upon itself. "We are, and ought to be, obscure to ourselves," said Goethe, "turned outward, and working upon the world which surrounds us." Outward radiation constitutes health; a too continuous concentration upon what is within brings us back to vacuity and blank. It is better that life should dilate and extend itself in ever-widening circles, than that it should be perpetually diminished and compressed by solitary contraction. Warmth tends to make a globe out of an atom; cold, to reduce a globe to the dimensions of an atom. Analysis ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... advent of Truth in the heart, there comes an overwhelming sense of error's vacuity, of the blunders which arise from wrong apprehension. The enlightened heart loathes error, and casts it aside; or else that heart is consciously untrue to the light, faithless to itself and to others, and so sinks into deeper ...
— Retrospection and Introspection • Mary Baker Eddy
... be puffed up," continued Mr. Churchouse, "for, with charm, you combine to a certain extent the Greek vacuity. There are no lines upon your ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... the old lady, adding with an innocent vacuity of manner quite characteristic of Quaker Bridge. "Let me know when the weddin's ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
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