"Meaningless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... predisposition, there would be nothing for education and culture to act upon."[92] A mere verbal revelation can not communicate the knowledge of God, if man have not already the idea of a God in his mind. A name is a mere empty sign, a meaningless symbol, without a mental image of the object which it represents, or an innate perception, or an abstract conception of the mind, of which the word is the sign. The mental image or the abstract ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... I'm not the incarnation of all the virtues you imagined me to be!" Olive sat down and played nervously with a penholder, jabbing meaningless lines and dots on to ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... moment in Anthony's head and heart? Many things must have become rather violently and painfully clear to him; many things must have changed their aspect, and adjusted themselves in new combinations. Many things that had seemed trifling or meaningless must have assumed significance and importance. No doubt he was shaken by many tumultuous thoughts and feelings. But outwardly he appeared almost unmoved. He returned the book to the table, and began to walk ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... life only as shattered, meaningless fragments, confused, mutilated masses without coherence. The masses and the gaps between them were of the same substance in her eyes. She wandered into her past as a child might wander among the rubbish heaps of its old home in ruins. She was vaguely conscious that there had been a design once ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... clubs broadens out in one's mind to an instrument of companionship through which many may be led from a sense of isolation to one of civic responsibility, even as another type of club provides recreational facilities for those who have had only meaningless excitements, or, as a third type, opens new and interesting vistas of life to those who ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... disjointed arcade of the aqueducts, the deep-shadowed blue of the Alban Hills, touched into pale lights by their scattered towns. We stopped at the ruined basilica of San Stefano, an affair of the fifth century, rather meaningless without a learned companion. But the perfect little sepulchral chambers of the Pancratii, disinterred beneath the church, tell their own tale— in their hardly dimmed frescoes, their beautiful sculptured ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... to the dictates of physiology. The satiety produced by an often-repeated dish, and the gratification caused by one long a stranger to the palate, are not meaningless, as people carelessly assume; but they are the incentives to a wholesome diversity of diet. It is a fact, established by numerous experiments, that there is scarcely any one food, however good, which supplies in due proportions or right forms all the elements required for carrying ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... evil eyes. The dragons were walking backwards it was true, but they kept their eyes fixed on him none the less. The eyes which he saw were, in truth, only the two buttons at the back of a frock-coat: perhaps some traditional memory of their meaningless character gave this half-witted prominence to their gaze. The slit between the tails was the nose-line of the monster: whenever the tails flapped in the winter wind the dragons licked their lips. It was only a momentary ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... genius of the Renaissance opened for investigation. In the former of these regions we find two agencies at work—art and scholarship. During the Middle Ages the plastic arts, like philosophy, had degenerated into barren and meaningless scholasticism—a frigid reproduction of lifeless forms copied technically and without inspiration from debased patterns. Pictures became symbolically connected with the religious feelings of the people, formulas from which to deviate would be impious in the artist and confusing to the worshipper. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... round at the moment. . . . But it isn't quite as easy as all that, my dear fellow. In times of unrest power comes automatically more and more into the hands of the man who can talk; men like Ramage, and others of his kidney. A few meaningless but high flown phrases; a few such parrot cries as 'Down with the Capitalist and the Future is for the Worker,' and you've got even the steadiest man unsettled. . . . Especially if he's one of a crowd; mob psychology is the devil. . . ." Sir James paused and ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... which came nearest to being a point of uniformity and a possible bond of union among these reformers was their objection to infant baptism. To them baptism was the mark of a personally attained relation to Christ, and was, therefore, meaningless when administered to an unconscious infant. Certain "prophets" who came to Wittenberg from Zwickau confronted Luther and Melancthon with this principle as early as 1521; and radical reformers proclaimed ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney
... the theme "a toi" would return like the refrain of a song to which he found himself keeping step; but the words sometimes became meaningless; for in the merciful way that nature has, the impulse of self-preservation so occupied his mind that he had scarcely leisure to ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... it to his lips and piped upon it once or twice as the moor-fowl pipes in spring. "Do you hear that?" he asked. "It is all, my General, we get from life and knowledge—a very thin and apparently meaningless and altogether monotonous squeak upon a sappy stem. Some of us make it out and some of us do not, because, as it happens, we are not so happily constituted. You would have your daughter a patient Martha of the household, and she will be playing ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... the plateau in the direction from which they had first entered it. Their conversation was broken and often meaningless, but eminently pleasing to ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades
... the sentence aside as nonsense, argued it away, proved that it was really meaningless, would have been easy—at any other time or in any other place; and, had the past week brought me none of the vivid impressions it had brought me, this is doubtless what I should have done. My narrowness again was proved. We understand in others only what we have ...
— The Damned • Algernon Blackwood
... president election results: President Paul BIYA reelected; percent of vote - Paul BIYA 92.6%; note - supporters of the opposition candidates boycotted the elections, making a comparison of vote shares relatively meaningless ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... manner. Jessie, her eldest daughter, was not altogether uncomely in a commonplace way: she was dark-haired, high-coloured, loud-voiced—generally sprightly and voluble and overpowering; she was in such a hurry to speak that her words tripped one another up, and she had a meaningless and, to ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... at once that the emotion struggling within his heart must burst forth at last and pervade the visible world. He was conscious of an impulse to sing, to laugh, to talk in broken sentences to himself; and any utterance, however slight and meaningless, seemed to relieve in a measure the nervous tension of ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... drowning his summons for admission. He listened, perplexed. Light and rapid footsteps, the swishing of a silken skirt, a clear, musical laugh and cry of triumph, a succession of sounds which were wholly meaningless to him. Surely it was some sort of pandemonium. A momentary silence was followed by a chorus of voices. Reist raised his stick and knocked more loudly. A man's voice travelled out to ...
— The Traitors • E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim
... faces arched like glimmering pebbles the huge dim-coloured vault above his head. He heard a voice above the monstrous rustling of the wheel, clamouring, calling him back. He was hastening headlong, muttering to himself his own flat meaningless name, like a child repeating as he runs his errand. And then as if in a charmed cold pool he awoke and opened his eyes again on the gathering darkness of the great bedroom, and heard a quick, importunate, long-continued knocking on the door below, ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... would have seen little of interest there, even if, by chance, we could have seen aught. Perhaps had one been there to point them out to us, we might have noted indentations in the mud, but there were countless indentations, one overlapping another into a confusion that would have been entirely meaningless to us. To Tarzan each told its own story. Tantor, the elephant, had passed that way as recently as three suns since. Numa had hunted here the night just gone, and Horta, the boar, had walked slowly along ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... rouge and burnt cork, and haggard hair, gives him a truly awful aspect, remarked that the soil of the South was clotted with blood by fiends in human shape, (sensation in the diplomatic gallery.) The metaphor might be meaningless; but it struck him it was strong. These fiends were doubly protected by midnight and the mask. In his own State the Ku-Klux ranged together with the fierce whang-doodle. His own life had been threatened. (Faint applause.) ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 2, April 9, 1870 • Various
... fifty years ago—that is, within the memory of many a living man—gambling was 'the rage' in England, especially in the metropolis. Streets now meaningless and dull—such as Osendon Street, and streets and squares now inhabited by the most respectable in the land—for instance, St James's Square, THEN opened doors to countless votaries of the fickle and capricious goddess of Fortune; in the rooms of which many a nobleman, many a gentleman, many ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... personal purity, such as the Bible and other religious books. There is no doubt that such literature has a tremendous influence on many young people; but it has little influence on others, probably in part because the somewhat mystical style of most religious writings is meaningless to many people. ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow
... without feeling would still, I suppose, be a human being, because it would be conscious of existence; it would breathe and know that its heart was beating, but without sight or sensation there could be no idea of space—time, to it, would be a meaningless series of breaths or heartbeats. Without touch or sight it could have no idea of form or size, which are merely conditions of space, and both the past and the future would ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... shapely, hair brown with gray in it; in all the face a look of great power, reserved, but ready to act; eyes of changeable color, that took the shade of the emotion that chanced to come and look out of them; when unoccupied, cold, gray, and meaningless as a window-pane behind which no face is; and over all the countenance the look of great gravity, divided by but the ...
— How Deacon Tubman and Parson Whitney Kept New Year's - And Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... only a sense of forsakenness and desolation. Information was sought of these spiders, but in vain. They were of a different nationality from those with the expedition, and their language seemed but a musical, meaningless jargon. They were a timid, gentle race, but ignorant, and heathenish worshipers of unknown gods. The expedition detailed a great detachment of missionaries to teach them the true religion, and in ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... or the life of the Victorian Era from its architecture. Yet we are the heirs of all that is noblest in that greatest of all arts; and if you would test that, you need only look at any mediaeval French Cathedral with a seeing eye. You will find no meaningless mass of bricks and mortar, but the speaking record of the age that built them. "The stone shall cry out of the wall, and the beam out of the timber ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... into the street; that is what he deserves. He probably followed me when I came away from the opera-house, and now he is trying to make capital out of a meaningless incident. Put him out, and don't permit him to pass the door again to-night; otherwise, he will seek to annoy a lady ...
— The Last Woman • Ross Beeckman
... of the best building-materials, and the absence both of architects and of artistic tastes. It was a simple ritual which most of them were to house, and the absence of an ornate service demanded the absence of ornamentation, which would be meaningless because it would symbolize nothing. The influence of the Puritans in Massachusetts, the Baptists in Rhode Island, the Dutch Reformed in New York, the Lutherans and Presbyterians in the Middle and Southern colonies, and the Friends in Pennsylvania, whatever their denominational ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... everything, and brooked no transgression of its law. The daughters were educated on the same principles; they were kept in strict home seclusion; their mental development was of the lowest order, and did not extend beyond the narrowest limits of household life. And all this was crowned by an empty and meaningless etiquette, whose part it was to replace mind and culture, and which made life altogether, and especially that of a woman, ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... emptied his water-jug over the intruder; and yet if he could have seen the new boy at that moment, he would have seen that pretty little face—only meant as yet for the smiles of childhood—white with an almost idiotic terror, and he would have caught a staring and meaningless look in the glassy eyes which were naturally so bright and blue. But he really did not know—being merely an overgrown stupid fellow—the mischief he was doing, and the absolute horrible torment that his ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... stern Hicksite Quaker. In Susan's early life he objected on principle to all forms of frivolous amusement, such as music, dancing, or novel reading, while games and even pictures were regarded as meaningless luxuries. Such puritanical convictions might have easily degenerated into mere cant; but underlying all was a broad and firm basis of wholesome respect for individual freedom and a brave adherence to truth. He was a man of good business capacity, and a thorough manager of ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... closed Chippendale cases, on the drawers containing his collection of wall-papers, on the footling peacocks, on the curtains and cushions, on the veined ivory paper which, beginning to fade two years ago, now looked mean and meaningless. It was an abominable room. It ought to be smelling of musk or pastilles or joss-sticks. It might have done so, for once he had tried something of the sort, and did not renew the experiment only because the smell happened to ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... turned from the chest of boxes to the dressing table, bed, closet, and bath, "all these for me, and you know absolutely nothing about me——I get a big lump in my throat, and the words that do come all seem so meaningless, I am perfectly ashamed to say them. Oh Man, why ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter
... imperialism, after the March revolution, when the power was transferred into the hands of the Cadet bourgeoisie, the naked policy of provocation gave way to one of cowardly distrust of the peoples of Russia, to a policy of fault-finding, of meaningless "freedom" and "equality" of peoples. The results of such a policy are known: the growth of national enmity, the impairment ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... spoken, the tones of his voice, and her own emotion, were blotted from her recollection as if a thick darkness had wiped them out, and from the hour of her deepest anguish she could bring back only a meaningless gesture and the white rosebud he had worn in his coat. What she had suffered then was the dying agony of the thing within her which was really herself, and there remained to her now only the vacant image from which the passion and the life ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... at home at the piano, and dashing off into a brilliant and difficult overture, she held her hearers for a few minutes astonished both at her execution and the sounds she made. To the most of them, however, the sounds were meaningless; their tastes had not yet been cultivated up to Ethelyn's style. They wanted something familiar—something they had heard before; and when the fine performance was ended terrible Tim electrified her with the characteristic exclamation: "That was mighty fine, no doubt, for ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... seized us, and all things go wrong, The women have leaped from "their spheres," And, instead of fixed stars, shoot as comets along, And are setting the world by the ears! In courses erratic they're wheeling through space, In brainless confusion and meaningless chase. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... bound to make themselves heard. They beat upon the heart like hail upon the sand—and fall buried in the scars they cause. Things of the flesh may and do become dead sea fruit; but things of the spirit often become stale and meaningless also. What is more weary than a tired mind? What joys and labours are more exhausting than those of the intellect, and the intellect only? Does an idle week in summer ever beget more lassitude or such disgust of life as a month—alone ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... come, and Danvers, unfamiliar with death, knew no words of consolation for the father bereft of his firstborn. A numbness mercifully comes during those first hours, which makes it possible to move about and go through strange, meaningless ceremonies with a calm that surprises those who have not known the searing touch ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... the discussion of fertile eggs, I want to point out the fact that the whole subject of fertility as distinct from hatchability, is somewhat meaningless. The facts of the case are, that whatever factors in the care of the stock will get a large percentage fertile eggs, will also give hatchable eggs and vice versa. This is to be explained by the fact that ...
— The Dollar Hen • Milo M. Hastings
... training. Clay hardens by immobility—men's minds by standing pat. Both lose the power to take new impressions. Many of the old-style leaders regard the political truths which alone insure the progress of the Nation, and will hereafter completely dominate it, as the mere meaningless babble of political infants. They have grown old in the belief that money has the right to rule, and they can never understand the point of view of the men who recognize in the corrupt political activity of a railroad or a trust a most dangerous ...
— The Fight For Conservation • Gifford Pinchot
... consulted the code. Then these detached and meaningless words took on a significance which she could not afford ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... an absurd proposal. If it meant that he would come alone, it was a falsehood. In either case it was a device to fritter away time. [Sidenote: Sulla's astuteness and superstition.] For all the while that he was bandying meaningless messages he continued his onward march. He had sacrificed, and the soothsayer Postumius, when he saw the entrails, had stretched out his hands to him, and offered to be kept in chains for punishment after the battle if it ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... Wiertz, most cynical of artists, representing the man of the Future and the things of the Past. A naturalist holds in his right hand a magnifying glass, and in the other a handful of Napoleon and his marshals, guns, and battle-flags,—tiny objects swelling with meaningless glory. He examines these intensely, while a child at his side looks on in open-eyed wonder. She cannot understand what a grown man can find in these curious trifles that he should take the ...
— The Call of the Twentieth Century • David Starr Jordan
... lodge sites, even where these are damp most of the year. In the pits, where such remains are preserved by ashes, this would not mean much; but where they are found in clayey earth it is evident that "thousands of years" is a meaningless term to ...
— Archeological Investigations - Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 76 • Gerard Fowke
... understood, that the world—so dazzling to me now—was made for love and is meaningless without it. The years until yesterday are gray—no, not gray, because that was the colour You were wearing—not gray, because that is a beautiful colour. The empty years until yesterday had no colour at all. Yes, the world has meaning only through loving, and without meaning there is no ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... from above are invoked to drive out the intruders. The former is then said to have swooped down upon them as a hawk darts upon its prey, while the latter is declared to have scattered the birds which were holding a council. This being done, relief is accomplished. Y[^u]! is a meaningless interjection frequently used to introduce or close ...
— The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees • James Mooney
... went to the library and shut himself up there alone. How strangely was this house altered to him in one moment's time! Just now he had felt a presence in it which had made every atom of it significant. Now, how dead, empty, meaningless, it had suddenly become! ...
— A Manifest Destiny • Julia Magruder
... that had once been a part of herself recreated. The prayer concerned that. "Even though I die, I will in some way keep defeat from you," she cried, and so deep was her determination that her whole body shook. Her eyes glowed and she clenched her fists. "If I am dead and see him becoming a meaningless drab figure like myself, I will come back," she declared. "I ask God now to give me that privilege. I demand it. I will pay for it. God may beat me with his fists. I will take any blow that may befall ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... vulgar in wonder be lost at 25 My transfigurations, and name me Apostate, Such a meaningless nickname, which never incens'd me, Cannot prejudice you or your Cousin against me: I'm Ex-bishop. What then? Burke himself would agree That I left not the Church—'twas the Church that left me. My titles prelatic I lov'd and retain'd, 31 As long as what I meant ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... survivors of those who saved the Union. They did the one deed which if left undone would have meant that all else in our history went for nothing. But for their steadfast prowess in the greatest crisis of our history, all our annals would be meaningless, and our great experiment in popular freedom and self-government a gloomy failure. Moreover, they not only left us a united Nation, but they left us also as a heritage the memory of the mighty deeds by which the Nation was kept united. ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... pinkish stone (covered with heavy sculpture and breaking out into countless balconies and bay windows), and soon found ourselves in the market-place. And here, indeed, one felt oneself in the Germany of bygone days. Instead of pseudo-classic buildings, heavy with meaningless ornamentation, we found beautiful old timber-framed houses, with deep eaves and wood carvings. On one of ...
— A War-time Journal, Germany 1914 and German Travel Notes • Harriet Julia Jephson
... perhaps, some centuries from now, be brought again to light, and excite as much marvel and inquiry as any mysterious building of old, the purpose of which we do not understand, and the use of which we cannot now account for. They will be seemingly as meaningless as any lonely cairn, isolated broken piece of wall, or solitary fragment of a building, of which no principal part remains, and which puzzles us to account ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... be seen in many figures of women playing upon instruments of music, ranged around the walls. One girl at the organ is graceful; another with a tambourine has a sort of Bassarid beauty. But the group of Apollo, Pegasus, and a Muse upon Parnassus, is a failure in its meaningless frigidity, while few of these subordinate compositions show power of conception or vigour ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... loves: he has come within the shadow of the Divine Reality as the wondrous book of Life and Death opens on the battlefield. The result is the Soldier's Gospel. It would cause the devotees of little Bethel to faint with its crude "superstitions" and absence of meaningless and stupid dogma yet its grip of spiritual things and Divine Aid would make the ordinary "go to meeting" Christian gape with astonishment. The soldier's simple faith, his willing endurance, his quiet heroisms, his silent self-sacrifice, though they call for no louder name than duty, are just ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... standing on one of those far stars he had been asking about, and was shouting at him through an immense tube of sky and darkness. The words pricked his ears like needle-points, only he no longer heard them as words, but as tiny explosions of sound, meaningless and distant. Swift flashes of light began to dance before his eyes, and suddenly from underneath the tree, a wind rose up and rushed, laughing, across his face. Darkness in a mass dropped over his eyes, and he sank backwards somewhere into ...
— Jimbo - A Fantasy • Algernon Blackwood
... brains have quite snubbed and sent to Coventry your stomachs, never could perceive how the pudding was a poem to the cobbler and his wife,—how a very actual sense of the live goodness of Jesus was in it,—how its spicy steam contained all the cordial cheer and jollity they had missed in meaningless days of the year. Then she brought her sewing-chair, and sat down, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... whom he did not know. Alison alone was seated, leaning back in an armchair, her expression of bored annoyance illustrated by the quick, steady tapping of the toe of her polished boot. She met his questioning look with a ready if artificial and meaningless smile. ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance
... thought that the resurrection naturally lost its vital significance, and it has practically held no place in the great systems of philosophy elaborated by the Christian thinkers in modern times." And, yet, the Church continues to repeat the now meaningless words, "I believe in the Resurrection of the Body." And while practically no one now believes it, still the recital of the words, and the statement of one's belief in them, forms a necessary requisite for admission into the Christian Church to-day. Such is the persistent hold ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... remembered where he was and how he got here. But it took him a long while for this, and the past seemed to him as if it had been covered by a veil, infinitely distant, infinitely far away, infinitely meaningless. He only knew that his previous life (in the first moment when he thought about it, this past life seemed to him like a very old, previous incarnation, like an early pre-birth of his present self)—that his previous ...
— Siddhartha • Herman Hesse
... tell her that she had done right. But she had no one to talk to. She had lost her mother long before; she thought her father a queer man, and could not talk to him seriously. He worried her with his whims, his extreme readiness to take offence, and his meaningless gestures; and as soon as one began to talk to him, he promptly turned the conversation on himself. And in her prayer she was not perfectly open, because she did not know for certain what ...
— The Darling and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... universe. He strove constantly after system, and the instrument on which his effort relied was the speculative reason. He embodied in an extreme form the spirit of his age. Nothing could be less like the spirit of ours. To many people now alive metaphysics means a body of wild and meaningless assertions resting on spurious argument. A professor of metaphysics may nowadays be held to deal handsomely with the duties of his chair if he is prepared to handle metaphysical statements at all, though it be ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... proposes two letters, as, for example, c o. Then each player must in turn call a word beginning with those letters, as come. A player is beaten if he says a word beginning with any other than the letters named, or calls a word already given, or a meaningless word, or, when only two are playing, if his opponent makes two correct words while he is thinking of his. The addition of s is not considered to form a new word where ...
— Harper's Young People, September 21, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... coming down Duck Bank paused an instant near Darius, and with a smile spoke to him, holding out his hand. Darius gave a slight nod. The man, snubbed and confused, walked on, the smile still on his face, but meaningless now, and foolish. ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... instant Hare's brain reeled, and Mescal's broken murmurings were meaningless Then his faculties grew steady and acute; he held the girl as if he intended never to let her go. Mescal clung to him with a wildness that gave him anxiety for her reason; there was something almost fierce in the tension of ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... however, on the way to my own. Strange to say, no one was there; yet some one had evidently been lying on the bed, and on the pillow lay the old book on the Second Sight, open at the very page which had so bewitched him and vexed me. I glanced at it mechanically, and when I came to the meaningless jumble, "In thunder two," a flash flooded the chamber, and a sudden fear struck into my mind. Who knew what insane experiment might have come ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... should have sounded forth in triumph above the foundering wrecks of Time! O Poet unworthy of thy calling! ... How thou hast wantoned with the sacred Muse! ... how thou hast led her stainless feet into the mire of sensual hypocrisies, and decked her with the trumpery gew-gaws of a meaningless fair speech!—How thou hast caught her by the virginal hair and made her chastity the screen for all thine own licentiousness! ... Thou shouldst have humbly sought her benediction,—thou shouldst have handled her with gentle reverence and patient ardor,—from her wise lips ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... to remain there, until by virtue of their own efforts they may rise to higher planes. The negro has never sought, does not now, nor will he seek to step beyond his limit. "Social equality," "Negro domination," and "Negro supremacy," are meaningless terms to him so far as his own aspirations are concerned. The social side of this question will regulate itself. It has always done so, in all ages and all climes, despite coercion, despite law. This is the least of the negro's cares. His ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... meaningless, so strong was the feeling that she had no right to be reading it at all, but as she went on she forgot her scruples. It was evidently a reply to a letter from her lover in which he had spoken of the cloud that hung over his name, and it was a confession of her faith in him, girlish, sweet and ...
— The Little Red Chimney - Being the Love Story of a Candy Man • Mary Finley Leonard
... experience, was nothing to this. Once de Spain threw out a groping hand and, before she could escape, caught her skirt. Nan tried to pull away. His grip did not loosen. She took his hand in hers and, while he muttered meaningless words, forced his fingers open and drew away. His hand was dry and ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... that it is more logical, more carefully reasoned, tends at times to render it less psychologically true. Each version has its own merits and its own faults, and in their appeal they are so radically different that a choice between them must always remain meaningless except on temperamental grounds. At one point, however—and an important one at that—the metrical version seems to ...
— Master Olof - A Drama in Five Acts • August Strindberg
... square windows of the sober, opulent North Country house! And the maddest part of it all was the horrible reluctance he felt to comply with his wife's wish. He seemed to himself to pause noticeably before answering her with a meaningless half-laugh: ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... in theory he was delighted to pay periodical visits to the wife and children of his dead brother William; in practice, he infinitely preferred the comfort and seclusion of his own house and garden, and the companionship of his books and his parrot to these rather meaningless and tiresome incursions into a family circle with which he had little in common. It was not so much the spur of his own conscience that drove him to make the occasional short journey by rail to visit his relatives, as an obedient ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... about a stone, and tied it with a wisp of grass. With a sudden flexile turn of a wrist that had thrown many a reata, he flung it straight through the open window. Elena read the meaningless phrases, then fell insensible ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... original addition to heroic psychological literature in the little work whose title we have given. For more than two years he has apparently spent a considerable time each day in committing to memory sets of meaningless syllables, and trying to trace numerically the laws according to which they were retained or forgotten. Most of his results, we are sorry to say, add nothing to our gross experience of the matter. Here, as in the case of the saints, heroism seems ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 508, September 26, 1885 • Various
... had begun again immediately Sally knew it was Janet, commenced now to break into uneven, uncontrolled breaths, that by degrees became quieter and quieter as Janet whispered the fond, meaningless things into her ear. Meaningless? They would have had no meaning to any who might have overheard; but in Sally's heart, as it was meant they should be, they were charged to the full—a cup beneath an ever-flowing fountain that brims over—with ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... testimony of the five physical senses constitutes "things as they are." But—if Jose's reasoning be not illogical—the human mind receives no testimony from these senses, which, at most, can offer but insensate and meaningless vibrations in a pulpy mass called the brain. The true knowledge of God, for which Jose had yearned and striven, begins only when men turn from the mesmeric deception of the physical senses, and learn that there is something, knowable and usable, behind them, and of whose existence ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... simple terms Phil used. She seemed to him like a teacher who keeps a dull pupil after class, and, by eliminating all unessential factors, makes clear what an hour before had been only a jumble of meaningless terms in the ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... something like a smile, and muttered feebly and painfully, 'I'm gaein' to the wow, nae to come back again.' Elsie could not restrain her tears; while the old man, looking fixedly at her, though with meaningless eyes, muttered, for the last time, 'Come hame! come hame!' and sank into a lethargy, from which nothing could rouse him, till, next morning, he was waked by friendly death from the long sleep of this world's night. They bore him to his favourite church-yard, and ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 1 • George MacDonald
... us through Christianity and modern science. The absence of any such faith in activity and progress creates the pessimism of the East. Hinduism and Buddhism are alike in their bankruptcy on this side. The majestic religious philosophy of India sees in history only an endless and meaningless repetition. Thucydides and Plato assume the same view, if I mistake not. As Eucken says, 'Ancient views of life bore throughout an unhistorical character. The numerous philosophical doctrines of the procession of endless similar cycles, ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... of the hour. The language of religious discourse is liable to a subtle kind of pedantry, requiring a vigorous intellect adequately to dissolve. New illustrations, novel forms of definition, are often helpful in expelling the dreariness of outworn and meaningless phrases. Ruskin's task is facilitated by the nice balance of his intellectual and imaginative endowments, by the fact that his words are not mere symbols of definite connotation, but marvellous centres of emotional force. Happily he did not ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... fundamental futility of the whole scheme of things is so absolute that what most modern writers would regard as the illogical dreams of superannuated eccentrics he is inclined to treat with smiling reverence and infinite sympathy. Where the whole terrestrial business is only a meaningless blur upon the face of nothingness, why should we not linger by the way, under elm trees, or upon broken fragments of old temples, or on sunny benches in cloistered gardens, and listen to the arbitrary fancies of unpractical and incompetent persons ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... very pretty," murmured Lysbeth, through whose bewildered brain the stilted and meaningless words buzzed like bees in an empty hive, "though I am sure I cannot guess how you find the heart in such times as these to write poetry to fine ladies whom ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... knees upon the deck aft, shoving his holystone to and fro laboriously and unhandily along the planks where the accident with the tar-pot had left its stain, the Dago still broke into little meaningless smiles. For him, at any rate, the narrow scope between the stem and stern of the Anna Maria was not the world. He had but to lift up the eyes of his mind to behold, beyond it and dwarfing it to triviality, the glamours of a life in which it ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... had selected was in a remote part of the building, there was little immediate chance of detection. So the laughter of the party grew louder and sillier; the talk more foolish and random; the merriment more noisy and meaningless. But still most of them mingled some sense of caution with their enjoyment, and warned Eric and Wildney more than once that they must look out, and not take too much that night for fear of being caught. But it was Wildney's birth-day, and Eric's ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... dogmatised as to the uselessness of particular structures, and as to the consequent impossibility of their having been developed by means of natural selection. His observations on Orchids enabled him to say: "I can show the meaning of some of the apparently meaningless ridges, horns, who will now venture to say that this or that structure is useless?" A kindred point is expressed in a letter to Sir J.D. Hooker ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... a person who knew nothing of Paris, who had never been in Paris, and who was not somewhat au fait with the gay and triste, the splendid and squalid, the brilliant and unequal society there, these sketches would be meaningless. Again, Gavarni's pictures are not series. He does not develop his heroes and heroines. He does not make us feel for them in their mishaps. We do not laugh with them, as we would with friends or acquaintances, but we laugh at them. We do not once recognize ourselves in them. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... distance, is to be of confusion, then sometimes seen near, the work must be a confusion worse confounded, almost utterly unintelligible; hence the amazement and blank wonder of the public at some of the finest passages of Turner, which look like a mere meaningless and disorderly work of chance; but, rightly understood, are preparations for a given result, like the most subtle moves of a game of chess, of which no bystander can for a long time see the intention, but which are, ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... this in the most natural way, just as one tells a meaningless anecdote in a drawing-room. But Yvonne, suddenly seized with ...
— The Confessions of Arsene Lupin • Maurice Leblanc
... woman, whose habits and character are low and worthless, was abrupt and insolent in her manner; and after in vain endeavouring to call forth some explanation of the words she was reported to have uttered, I left the house fully persuaded that she had only given vent to a meaningless boast, and that the idle words of a disorderly gossip could not be taken as evidence against a man of the blameless character and austere habits of Aram. Since, however, you have now re-awakened investigation, ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... dear," she said, "I don't know, darling. I don't understand." Her voice broke as she lifted her beautiful face to me. I looked into those wonderful eyes, and they gazed back at me with a dull, meaningless stare. She stretched out her arm to grasp my hand, and her own hand clutched ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux
... involved in the argument for a Deity. As, in one case, we cannot give any meaning to an existence without a beginning, so, in the other, we can attach no meaning to the word 'substance.' If the analogy be correct, the true inference would be that both doctrines are meaningless aggregations of words, and therefore not capable of being in any true sense either 'believed' or 'disbelieved.' So again the view of the external world suggests to Newman 'atheism, pantheism, or polytheism.' Almighty benevolence has created ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... his sentiments faintly, hesitatingly, for they were abashed at what they saw in their chief's face and realized that words were weak and meaningless. ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... and, though she had pinned her faith upon falsehood and had made her sacrifice to the little gods, there were moments still when the undelivered soul within her awoke and stirred as a child stirs in the womb. Even as she went back to the game anew, she was conscious that it would be a battle of meaningless words, of shallow insincerities—yet she went back, nevertheless, before the disgust the thought awoke had passed entirely from among ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... was defaced for some pages by incoherent and meaningless ravings. It seemed as if one of his dark fits of frenzy had at that time come over the writer. At length, in a more firm and clear character than that immediately preceding it, the manuscript continued ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... sensations in singing cannot do; of which fact the clearest demonstration is given by the expressions, "bright," "dark," "nasal," "singing forward," etc., that I began by mentioning and that are almost always falsely understood. They are quite meaningless without the practical teachings of the sensations of such singers as have directed their attention to them with a knowledge of the end in view, and are competent to correlate them with ...
— How to Sing - [Meine Gesangskunst] • Lilli Lehmann
... techneer, lay on the padded shock cushion of his assigned bunk and stared with wide, disillusioned eyes at the stretch of stark, gray metal directly overhead. He tried to close his ears to the mutter of meaningless words coming from across the narrow cabin. Raf had known from the moment his name had been drawn as crew member that the whole trip would be a gamble, a wild gamble with the odds all against them. RS 10—those very numbers on the nose of the ship told part of the story. ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... waiting for orders; the wonder of how to adapt one's nature to the conditions that lay ahead. The fear of being afraid. Many times in that last week in London, which now seems so far away, I did aimless, meaningless things that I had done before; wondering if I should ever do them again. Visiting old scenes of happy days, trying, as it were, to conjure up old associations, for fear the chance might not come again. Strange, ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood
... as gentle, sweet, and merry, and do their duty as faithfully as any Christian, yet to them Heaven and Hell are meaningless abstractions; God and the soul are problems they, with quiet cheerfulness, leave ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... were times when I rejoiced in the idea that my sufferings were to be endless, I could not bear them to be without meaning. Now I find hidden somewhere away in my nature something that tells me that nothing in the whole world is meaningless, and suffering least of all. That something hidden away in my nature, like a treasure in a field, ...
— De Profundis • Oscar Wilde
... denied having children I will not say: but (I remember well) my father took it for granted that he had no children, and he said nothing to the contrary. Indeed on any other assumption his gift of the crown to me would have been meaningless." ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... was silly how the little word tore its way into her very heart; she had to bite her lips to keep herself from crying out. She did not realize that the word was meaningless to him. ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... the taboo enforced by a Morals Police is, perhaps, as good a way as any of gaining a fictitious sense of activity. But the ideal of "annihilation" becomes an irrelevant and meaningless phrase. If lust is deeply rooted in men and its only expression is evil, I for one should recommend a faith in the millennium. You can put this Paradise at the beginning of the world or the end of it. Practical ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... call," she said, "and tell the gentleman, whoever he might be, that I had heard a great deal about him and had come to see for myself. But I gather from what you say that this is not the custom here. You seem to have plenty of meaningless customs, but none of those that would help along. We are in advance, certainly. I suppose I shall have to give up the social side altogether;" and Henrietta, though she went about with her guidebook and pencil and wrote a letter to the Interviewer ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... and took the other's cold dry hand for an instant. The men who had overheard the short conversation looked upon it as a meaningless incident, the memory of which would disappear from the lieutenant's brain with the ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... to each other as the taxicab bumped through the cobbled streets, their talk being for the most part maledictions against Larry Brainard. But their words were meaningless sounds to the silent Maggie, all of whose throbbing faculties were just then merged into an excited endeavor to perceive the glorious outlines of the destiny toward which she rode. However, as the cab turned into Lafayette Place and rolled northward, her ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... notions of what wastes time and what does not, and much which the old world regards as politeness and good manners Americans consider as sheer waste of time. Time is, they think, far too precious to be occupied with ceremonies which appear empty and meaningless. It can, they say, be much more profitably filled with other and more useful occupations. In any discussion of American manners it would be unfair to leave out of consideration their indifference to ceremony and their highly developed sense of the value of time, but in ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... passed, and the central government could no longer make its power felt at the extremities of the empire save at irregular intervals, when its mandates were not intercepted or nullified in transmission. The functions of the "Eyes" and "Ears" of the king had degenerated into a mere meaningless formality, and were, more often than not, dispensed with altogether. The line of demarcation between the military and civil power had been obliterated: not only had the originally independent offices of satrap, general, and secretary ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... first in meaningless flourishes, then with occasional words, and finally Sylvia saw streaming away from the pencil the usual loose, scrawling handwriting. Several lines were written and then the pencil stopped abruptly. Sylvia standing near her father heard his breathing grow loud and saw in a panic that ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... still standing and in good condition, and yet they were built during the second Punic War. I saw on two of the gateways inscriptions which to me were meaningless, but which Seguier, the old friend of the Marquis Maffei, could no ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... of soldiers struggling, swearing, fighting their way to their various stations. Officers, half dressed and half awake, were rushing hither and thither, seeking their units, swearing at the men and shouting meaningless orders. Over all the stentorian voice of the sergeant major was vainly trying ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... stream down over the rounded boulders which formed the margin of the river. On the opposite bank another crowd was keeping pace with the wreck. As they ran, these people shouted at one another and gesticulated wildly. Their faces were white, their words were meaningless, for it was a spectacle tense with imminent disaster that they beheld; it turned ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... a simple problem. I am loyal, as I have said; but I am a daughter and sister first, patriot later. In a fit of meaningless bravado, tempered perhaps by some compulsion from over the border, my old father and brothers had joined a rebel commando. You, with a naivete which I had hardly expected in you, and for which I liked you, told me the objective of your column—information which meant ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... the history of a word, and of the processes by which its different forms, in different senses, were developed, might be made as interesting as any other story of events. But grammar is not taught thus: boys are introduced to a jargon about matters meaningless, and they are naturally as much enchanted as if they were listening to a chimaera bombinans in vacuo. The grammar, to them, is a mere buzz in a chaos of nonsense. They have to learn the buzz by rote; and a pleasant process that is—a seductive initiation into the mysteries. When they ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... bois, who followed Duluth and other French explorers, were wont to sing as they paddled over the rivers of the West or camped beneath the pines and the maples of the great forests. It is impossible to set the words of all of them to the music of the drawing-room, where they seem tame and meaningless; but when they mingle with "the solemn sough of the forest," or with the roar of rushing waters, the air seems imbued with the spirit of the surroundings. It has been well observed by M. Gagnon, a French Canadian, that "many of them have no beauty {452} except on the ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... and the other sat upon their horses. She scanned complacently the faces of both, then her eyes settled steadily on the face of the murderer. Still gazing intently she drew the back of her gloved fingers along the pommel. The man saw the motion, unnoted and unsignificant to any other save Angele, meaningless even to Melvill, the innocent and honest gentleman at his side; and he realised that the Queen had had a warning. Noting the slight stir among the gentlemen round him, he knew that his game was foiled, that there was no escape. He was not ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Homer, Homer, what is this? All your great heroes flung down upon the earth, shapeless, undistinguishable; mere meaningless dust; 'strengthless heads,' and no ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... else was, too. He had heard them over and over; he knew them by heart. He knew they were evenly balanced, with justice on both sides. He knew both nations longed for a settlement, but he knew neither would back down, for reasons of "face." Worst of all, he knew that any decision of his was meaningless. It was purely advisory, and he knew all too well what "advisory" opinions counted ...
— The Golden Judge • Nathaniel Gordon
... figures tramping toward us between the bayonets of their captors. They were a sturdy lot, this fresh "bag" from the hills, of a fine fighting age, and much less famished and war-worn than one could have wished. Their broad blond faces were meaningless, guarded, but neither defiant nor unhappy: they seemed none too sorry for ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... him that way. Frank was ready for anything that Bud suggested. He drank when Bud drank, went from the first saloon to the one farther down and across the street, returned to the first with cheerful alacrity and much meaningless laughter when Bud signified a desire to change. It soothed Bud and irritated him by turns, this ready acquiescence of Frank's. He began to take a malicious delight in testing that acquiescence. He began to try ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... the territory of the Maharaja of Kashmir are meaningless. In the huge Indus valley the incidence is only 4 persons per sq. mile. In Jammu and Kashmir it is 138. The map taken from the Census Report gives the details. The increase in the decade was on paper 8-1/2 p.c., ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... turned at the door, and threw a parting glance round the dainty old-fashioned chamber, trying to gather into one all the thoughts, memories, and resolves connected with it. He had nearly forgotten the frescos; the victorious sunshine had reduced the figures, satanic or beautiful, to a meaningless agglomeration of wandering lines and faded colors. As for his own portrait, it ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne |
