"Nothingness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... mutual illusion! my heart's desire would never be! I turned away, threw myself on the floor of the cave, and wept. Then I bethought me that her eyes had been a little open, and that now the awful chink out of which nothingness had peered, was gone: it might be that she had opened them for a moment, and was again asleep!—it might be she was awake and holding them close! In either case, life, less or more, must have shut them! I was ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... wearily. As he laid her gently back upon the pillows, she sighed softly, her heavy lids unclosed a moment. "I knew you'd come," she murmured. "You'll take care of—of Dorothy—you will—" Her voice trailed off into nothingness; then ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... that system of philosophy which rests on the idea that the world is to be redeemed by negation of the will to live, the conquering of all desire—that the highest happiness is the achievement of nirvana, nothingness. This conception finds its highest expression in the quietism and indifferentism of the old Brahmanic religion (if such it can be called), in which holiness was to be obtained by speculative contemplation, which seems to me the quintessence of selfishness. In the reformed Brahmanism called Buddhism, ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... darting off on a hyperbolic orbit that forbids it ever to return, or an elliptical one that cannot be closed for hundreds or thousands of years; the tail meantime pointing always away from the sun, and fading to nothingness as the weird voyager recedes into the spatial void whence it came. Not many times need the advent of such an apparition coincide with the outbreak of a pestilence or the death of a Caesar to stamp the race of comets as an ominous clan in the minds ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... man continued its headlong course. It was running in a circle of many miles, impelled through the nothingness of night by the dark soul ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... a commonplace of ancient philosophy that the life of the wise man should be a contemplation of, and a preparation for, death. It certainly was so with Marcus Aurelius. The thoughts of the nothingness of man, and of that great sea of oblivion which shall hereafter swallow up all that he is and does, are ever present to his mind; they are thoughts to which he recurs more constantly than any other, and from which he always draws the ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... still flesh-imitating clay. Right in you, right in him, such way be man's! God only makes the live shape at a jet. Will ye renounce this fact of creatureship? The pattern on the Mount subsists no more, Seemed awhile, then returned to nothingness, But copies, Moses strove to make thereby Serve still and are replaced as time requires: By these make newest vessels, reach the type! If ye demur, this judgment on your head, Never to reach the ultimate, angels' law, Indulging every ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... was God this awful time? Nowhere within the ken of the banished youth. In his own feeling Cosmo was outside the city of life—not even among the dogs—outside with bare nothingness—cold negation. Alas for him who had so lately offered to help another to pray, thinking the hour would never come to him when he could not pray! It had COME! He did not try to pray. The thought of prayer did not wake in him! Let no one say he was punished ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... a kiss one day; but soon as she beheld * My hoary hairs, though I my luxuries and wealth display'd; She proudly turned away from me, showed shoulders, cried aloud:— * 'No! no! by Him, whose hest mankind from nothingness hath made For hoary head and grizzled chin I've no especial-love: * What! stuff my mouth with cotton[FN265] ere in sepulchre ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... was taught by Newton, when he solved the problem of the world, and revealed the wonderful art displayed therein by the Supreme Architect. Never before, in the history of the human race, was so impressive a conviction made of the almost absolute nothingness of man, when measured on the inconceivably magnificent scale of the universe. No one, it is well known, felt this conviction more deeply than Newton himself. "I have been but as a child," said he, "playing on the sea-shore; now finding some pebble rather more polished, ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... quite clear of all responsibility for them and theirs, was a flawless heaven with the stellar and planetary universe in it, pitiless and passionless eyes perhaps—as Tennyson calls them—and strange fires; but in this case without power to burn and brand their nothingness into the visitors to St. Sennans, who laughed and talked and smoked and took no notice; and, indeed, rather than otherwise, considered that Orion's Belt and Aldebaran had been put there to make it a fine night for them to laugh and talk and ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... innocence and peace, irradiating the atmosphere around her. It is true the thought occurred to Ben, vaguely, that through harm to her he might inflict the greatest punishment upon her father; but the idea came like a dark shape that faded away and vanished into nothingness as soon as it came within the nimbus that ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... matter; and something belonging to movement, if under movement we include operation. And things need governing as to both: because even that which is stable, since it is created from nothing, would return to nothingness were it not sustained by a governing hand, as will be explained later ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... confronted many problems as the years had passed. He had seen men like himself die, leaving behind them the force they had controlled, and he had seen this force—controlled no longer—let loose upon the world, sometimes a power of evil, sometimes scattering itself aimlessly into nothingness and folly, which wrought harm. He was not an ambitious man, but—perhaps because he was not only a man of thought, but a Vanderpoel of the blood of the first Reuben—these were things he did not contemplate without restlessness. When Rosy had gone away and seemed lost to them, he ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... is observed that effects share the nature of what they originate from. Pitchers and ornaments, e.g. which are produced from clay and gold respectively, possess the nature of their causal substances. But you hold yourself that the world is not seen to be of the nature of nothingness; and certainly it is not observed to be so.—Again, if that which is underwent absolute destruction, it would follow that after one moment the entire world would pass away into nothingness; and subsequently the world again originating from nothingness, ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... one another's grief? And, when we do, by what standard can we measure it? More especially is comprehension rare, if we chance to be the original cause of the trouble. Do we think of the feelings of the beetles it is our painful duty to crush into nothingness? Not at all. If we have any compunctions, they are quickly absorbed in the pride of our capture. And more often still, as in the present case, we set our foot upon the poor victim by pure accident or ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... seemed to summer-time in Angela's thoughts! What a long gulf of nothingness to be bridged over, what a dull level plain to cross, before June and the roses could come round again, bringing with them the memory of last summer; and the days she had lived under the same roof with Fareham, and the evenings when they had sat in the same room, or loitered ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... for the one great war-defence Left us, since Aeacus' son in battle fell, Was Aias' mighty strength. And now the Gods Will to our loss destroy him, bringing bane On thee and me, that all we may fill up The cup of doom, and pass to nothingness." ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... first rush of a thousand happy, grateful, delicious sentiments of an overflowing heart, to hear that he loved another; to be commissioned to that other, the messenger, the minister; to feel all at once that utter nothingness which she was—which she ever must be, but which, till then, her young mind had not taught her—that utter nothingness to him who was all to her; what wonder that, in her wild and passionate soul, all the elements jarred ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... Hugo spoke, finishing with the words: "No, it is not the Unknown to him. I have said this before, and I shall never tire of repeating it: it is not darkness to him, it is Light! It is not the end, but the beginning; not nothingness, but eternity! Is not this the truth, I ask you who listen to me? Such coffins proclaim immortality. In the presence of certain illustrious dead, we understand the divine destiny of that intellect which has traversed earth to suffer and ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness. I did not know that I knew aught, or that I lived or acted or desired. I had neither will nor intellect. I was carried along to objects and acts by a certain blind natural impetus. I had a mind which caused me to feel anger, satisfaction, desire. These two facts led those about ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... them. It would not have been well if they had been. The business of human creatures in this planet is not summed up in the most excellent of priestly catechisms. The world and its concerns continued to interest men, though priests insisted on their nothingness. They could not prevent kings from quarrelling with each other. They could not hinder disputed successions, and civil feuds, and wars, and political conspiracies. What they did do was to shelter the weak from the strong. In the eyes of the clergy, the serf and his lord stood on the common level of ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... the instrument and resumed his blank stare into nothingness. Frederik was once more wholly engrossed in the book he was not reading. Hartmann broke in upon the ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... too wise to appear to avoid Courtenay. Indeed, she was studiously agreeable to him when they met. She adopted the safe role of good-fellowship, flattering herself that her own folly would shrink to nothingness under the hourly castigation thus inflicted. During this period, Mr. Boyle's changeable characteristics puzzled and amused her. As he grew stronger, and took part in the active life of the ship, so did his sudden excess of talkativeness disappear. Once she happened ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... as careful and as wasteful of time as ever. But when he enunciated his famous "pool!" the stranger was treated to a surprise. The first ball was literally snuffed into nothingness before it had risen five feet above the trap! Then quite slowly Mr. Kincaid followed the second to the top of its flight and broke it as though it had ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... that conceptions like these are calculated rather to depress than to elevate us in the scale of being; that, banished as he is by these contemplations to a corner of creation, and there reduced to an atom, man sinks to nothingness in this infinity of worlds. But a second thought corrects the impression. These vast contemplations are well calculated to inspire awe, but not abasement. Mind and matter are incommensurable. An immortal ...
— The Uses of Astronomy - An Oration Delivered at Albany on the 28th of July, 1856 • Edward Everett
... stars! 'tis well, Were thy last hour to come, This moment had been it; [1] yet by thy shroud I'll pull thee backward, squeeze thee to a bladder, Till thou dost groan thy nothingness away. Thou fly'st! 'Tis well. [Ghost retires. [2] I thought what was the courage of a ghost! Yet, dare not, on thy life—Why say I that, Since life thou hast not?—Dare not walk again Within these walls, on pain of the Red Sea. For, if henceforth I ever find thee here, As sure, sure ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... happened as all such great controversies have ever closed. "Who now-a-days takes those Standard Rules, either one or the other, for their guide in writing?" This is the finest lesson ever offered to the furious heads of parties, and to all their men; let them meditate on the nothingness of their "Standard Rules," by the fate ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... the mire of self-forgetfulness... of self-contempt,—calmly to turn away from all, to say 'enough!' and folding impotent arms upon the empty breast, to save the last, the sole honour he can attain to, the dignity of knowing his own nothingness; that dignity at which Pascal hints when calling man a thinking reed he says that if the whole universe crushed him, he, that reed, would be higher than the universe, because he would know it was crushing him, and it would know it not. A poor dignity! A sorry consolation! Try ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... and again, as having "outvillained villainy so far, that the rarity redeems him." And he is at last felt to be worth feeding and keeping alive for the simple reason of his being such a miracle of bespangled, voluble, impudent good-for-nothingness, that contempt and laughter cannot afford to let him die. But the roundest and happiest delivery of him comes from the somewhat waggish but high-spirited and sharpsighted Lord Lafeu, who finds him "my good window of lattice," and one whose "soul is in his clothes"; ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... He seemed hung in nothingness, an utter emptiness where nothing moved; only the ghostly whirls of light that ran lazily away from his beating hands until they died silently away into darkness, swallowed up in this unspeakable horror of soundless ...
— The Finding of Haldgren • Charles Willard Diffin
... as he now opened this window, to face gray sweetly-scented nothingness. But in the window glass, you saw, the appearance of his flourishing gardens remained unchanged: and in the half of the window to the right hand were quivering poplars, and Niafer and little Melicent were ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... wert thou nothingness? What is there that I fear to say? And yet, what help?... Ah, well-a-day, This ache ...
— The Trojan women of Euripides • Euripides
... conventional morality; but even then her blood flowed as quietly as ever in her fascinatingly graceful, tranquil body. Sometimes coming out of her fragrant bath all warm and enervated, she would fall to musing on the nothingness of life, the sorrow, the labour, the malice of it.... Her soul would be filled with sudden daring, and would flow with generous ardour, but a draught would blow from a half-closed window, and Anna Sergyevna would shrink into herself, and feel plaintive and almost angry, and there was only one ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... the complete silence outside. The well padded suit encompassed him so gently there was no sense of pressure on his body to make up for the weightlessness. Johnny felt as though he were bodiless, a naked brain with eyes only hanging in nothingness. ...
— Far from Home • J.A. Taylor
... a legend!" and the Princess smiled, turning her dark eyes with a bewitching languor on Gervase, who, for some reason or other which he could not explain, felt as if he were walking in a dream on the edge of a deep chasm of nothingness, into which he must presently sink to utter destruction. "All these old histories happened so long ago that they are nothing but myths ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... and are forgotten, who once inhabited this part of the country; such as the Mawsh-ko-desh, Urons, Ossaw-gees—who formerly occupied Saw-gi-naw bay; and the Odaw gaw-mees, whose principal habitation was about the vicinity of Detroit River. They are entirely vanished into nothingness. Not a single page of their history can be found on record in the history of this country, or hardly an allusion to their existence. My own race, once a very numerous, powerful and warlike tribe of Indians, who ...
— History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan • Andrew J. Blackbird
... free-will when examined by the natural reason—a thing that melts away inevitably first to haze, and then to utter nothingness. And for a time we feel convinced that it really is nothing. Let us, however, again retire from it to the common distance, and the phantom we thought exorcised is again back in an instant. There is the sphinx once more, distinct and clear as ever, holding in its hand the scales of good ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... blankly. "The Naipor? Gone?" It seemed as if the world had dropped away from his feet, leaving him to fall endlessly through nothingness. It was true, of course. It didn't take more than twenty-four hours to unload the ship's holds, and, since there had been no intention of reloading, there was no need to stay. He had long ...
— But, I Don't Think • Gordon Randall Garrett
... ['s][u]nyabindu, generally shortened to ['s][u]nya (the void). Brockhaus[146] has well said that if there was any invention for which the Hindus, by all their philosophy and religion, were well fitted, it was the invention of a symbol for zero. This making of nothingness the crux of a tremendous achievement was a step in complete harmony with the genius of ...
— The Hindu-Arabic Numerals • David Eugene Smith
... Her voice trailed into nothingness as she disappeared into the kitchen. When she emerged again she was still enumerating the charms of the absurdly low-priced Chicago ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber
... glad accord, Obedient to the high behest, To worship with their fragrant breath Around the altars of the Lord; And some, from nothingness and death, Pass to the heaven ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... have the proofs, general, to-day—at once, provided that we thoroughly understand each other. I am ambitious, general, and I have no wish to be driven back for a single day into nothingness, as I should be, if my enemies withdraw their confidence in me. Now I am, at least, a member of the senate; but if the senate is dissolved, and I should subsequently be deposed again from the ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... intrigue, bargaining, and begging, she had seated him at last in the Academie, she felt herself possessed by a certain veneration, forgetting that it was herself who had clothed him in that coat with the green palm leaves, in which his nothingness ceased to ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... woods—woods that so lately resounded with laughter—laughter ringing like a bell—the music of a merry heart. Withdraw those curtains which hide the heart-struck and the dead. Above you is the exquisite picture of Eleanora, gazing into the very bed at that form which lay shrouded in nothingness. You see the broad manly brow—even now the brown hair rises in graceful curls over that damp forehead. The lips are locked in an eternal smile, as if to mock the closed eyes and the recumbent form. Is it true that pictures of those we love are endowed with a clairvoyant ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... hell, has Italy become? And thy sweet cords Still trembled at the touch of thy right hand, Unhappy bard of love. Alas, Italian song is still the child Of sorrow born. And yet, less hard to bear, Consuming grief than dull vacuity! O blessed thou, whose life was one lament! Disgust and nothingness are still our doom, And by our cradle sit, and on ...
— The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi • Giacomo Leopardi
... school, you know, Julia, boys care nothing for a lord. A good cricketer, an excellent fellow, is worth all the earls in the peerage. But at college all that ceases; bats and balls sink into the nothingness in which corals and bells had sunk before. One grows manly, and worships coronets and carriages. I saw it was a fine thing to get a prize, but it was ten times a finer thing to get drunk with a peer. So, when I had done the first, ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... towards no happy goal for him or Mamma, or us, but at last towards hardly any goal at all for anybody! So mad did the affair grow;—and is so madly recorded in those inextricable, dateless, chaotic Books. We have now come to regions of Narrative, which seem to consist of murky Nothingness put on boil; not land, or water, or air, or fire, but a tumultuously whirling commixture of all the four;—of immense extent too. Which must be got crossed, in some human manner. ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... waltz came to an end, its last notes trailing off into nothingness and blowing away like a handful of leaves on a breeze. The kaleidoscopic patterns sorted themselves and turned into a circle of perambulating couples, and Gay and her partner passed the two men ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... of the water which is pushed back by the contained air. Just as such bubbles are not water, but are precisely the spots from which water is absent, so these units are not koilon, but the absence of koilon—the only spots where it is not—specks of nothingness floating in it, so to speak, for the interior of these space-bubbles is an absolute void to the highest power of vision that we can ...
— Occult Chemistry - Clairvoyant Observations on the Chemical Elements • Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater
... the air to meet him. But, alas! exaltation of feeling lasts only a moment; it drops us where it finds us. If it were not so, how easy to be a hero! The dull reaction of the present, like a slow avalanche, crushed and ground me into nothingness. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... and as Aquileia. Yet another march of thirty-two miles brought the squalid invaders to Patavium, proud of its imagined Trojan origin, and, with better reason, proud of having given birth to Livy. Patavium, too, was levelled with the ground. True, it has not like its sister towns remained in the nothingness to which Attila reduced it. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... as night, floated over Walter's reeling brain; darkness, pierced by a thousand gleaming, twinkling lights, brilliant as stars, then came a void and nothingness. Slowly at last he felt himself struggling up out of the void, battling, fighting for consciousness, then came a delicious sort of languor. If this was dying, it was very pleasant. Forms seemed to be flitting ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... fairy-like in the picture one sees at night from the Green below. Dozens of lighted windows gleam softly through the foliage, for all the world like witches' lamps. The day reveals thin, blue plumes of smoke stealing out of the tops of the trees to be wafted off into nothingness; they come from invisible chimneys far down in the leafy fastnesses. Up here are the huts of the newly married. Almost without exception, they are tiny affairs, scarcely larger than the metaphorical ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... Wolsey's political ideas. In the summer of 1528 the attacks of the allies on Naples were repulsed, and their armies annihilated. In the spring of 1529 the Emperor got the upper hand in Lombardy also. How utterly then did the oft-proposed plan, of depriving him of the supreme dignity, sink into nothingness: he was stronger than ever in Italy. The Pope was fortunate in not having joined the allies more closely; the relations of the States of the Church with Tuscany made a union with the Emperor necessary; he had a horror of a new quarrel with him. And as the ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... came knocking the thought that perhaps he did not care for her, and had deceived her to gain her favors. Then she flushed with anger and swore to herself she hated him, and hoped never to see his face again. And the castle faded and was wafted away to the realms of airy nothingness. ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... the mitigating hour that softens the heart made his spirit brave. Amid the ennobling sympathies of nature, the pursuits and purposes of worldly prudence and conventional advantage subsided into their essential nothingness. He willed to blend his life and fate with a being beautiful as that nature that subdued him, and he felt in his own breast the intrinsic energies that in spite of all obstacles should mould such an imagination ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... the gods pales into nothingness when compared with a toddy such as I make," said he. "Ambrosia may have been all right for the degenerates of the old Grecian and Roman days, but an American gentleman demands a toddy—a hot toddy." And then he proceeded with circumspection and dignity ...
— The Fifth String, The Conspirators • John Philip Sousa
... Swirling nothingness, a dry cachination as of some dead-as-dust thing laughing at life itself, a shuddering vibrance flooding through my flesh in waves of terrible nausea, a dim glow that grew and grew into terrifying ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... Mere Malheur, announcing that her place of concealment was to be searched by the Governor, excited her liveliest apprehensions. But that faded into nothingness in comparison with the absolute terror that seized her at the thoughts of the speedy arrival of her ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... shows how uneducated your eyes are, and how much they have to learn. I'm not very clever over such things, being best when I get scent of a buried temple, tomb, or city. But this waste of nothingness contains plenty to interest an observer, and I can help you a little if you will try to make the ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... spiritually mighty, yet so proudly, so austerely sad, that Harris felt as he stared, that the sight was more than his eyes could meet, and that in another moment the power of vision would fail him altogether, and he must sink into utter nothingness. ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... you—about the eyes," Mrs Macmichel said. She gave the photograph hurriedly back. She could not endure to look upon the eyes closed now upon their "first dark day of nothingness." ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... bright yellow eyes had faded to nothingness in the sunlight. "Gave you its health," said the man of Van Daamas respectfully as he broke ...
— Bolden's Pets • F. L. Wallace
... the latter said, "All Englishmen are ridiculous; and you are a good specimen of the race. Why should you stop on the public highway and talk nothingness ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... By-and-By." No; he whistled not at all, or, when he did, gay bits of jazz heard at the theatre or in a restaurant the night before. He deceived no one, least of all himself. Sometimes his voice would trail off into nothingness, but he would catch the tune and toss it up again, heavily, as though ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... Tuileries. But as an Austrian commander, he must wait for the opinion of men too far off to know a single fact of the campaign, too blind to know them if they were on the spot, and too jealous even of their own general to suffer him to beat the enemy if victory would throw their own nothingness into the shade." ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... force the Psalmist could not feel: "When I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars which Thou hast ordained; what is man that Thou are mindful of him? and the son of man that Thou visitest him?" The infinity of God, the nothingness of man: the poor brain reels before the contrast. Is it thinkable, we ask, that He whose dwelling-place is eternity should care for us even as we care for our children? So the question is often urged upon us to-day. But arguments of this kind, it ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... thing of beauty is a joy forever; Its loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness; but still will keep A bower quiet for us; and a sleep Full of sweet dreams, and health, and ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... him, made Dudley Stackpole as one set over and put apart from his fellows. Neither by daytime nor by nighttime was he thereafter to know darkness. Never again was he to see the twilight fall or face the blackness which comes before the dawning or take his rest in the cloaking, kindly void and nothingness of the midnight. Before the dusk of evening came, in midafternoon sometimes, of stormy and briefened winter days, or in the full radiance of the sun's sinking in the summertime, he was within doors lighting the lights which would keep the darkness ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... those whom he persecutes He is not intelligent enough to doubt He studied until the last moment Her husband had become quite bearable His habit of pleasing had prolonged his youth I feel in them (churches) the grandeur of nothingness I gave myself to him because he loved me I haven't a taste, I have tastes It was too late: she did not wish to win Knew that life is not worth so much anxiety nor so much hope Laughing in every wrinkle of his face Learn to live without desire Life as a ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... bright day, Jim landed at a little way station from which a single-gauge track ran off into apparent nothingness. Puffing on the single-gauge track was a "dinky" engine, coupled to a flat car. Wooden benches were fastened along one end of the car. The engineer and fireman were loading sheet iron on the other end. They looked Jim ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... disciples, agents, and fanatics in every class of society which has had, and often has still, the ear of kings and nobles—which, in a word, can raise its creatures to the highest positions, and with a word can reduce them again to the nothingness from which ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... neither will pass into nothingness, since neither came therefrom; and therefore every part of me, though changed in form, will continue to be a part of the Universe, and that part will change into another part, and so on through all the ages. And therefore, through such changes I myself exist; and, in like manner, those who ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... for a little while, by those who envied his greatness, resented his leadership, and sought to shake him from his lofty place. But he stood serene and imperturbable, while that denial, like many another blast of evil-scented wind, passed into nothingness, even before the disappearance of the party strife out of whose fermentation it had arisen. By the unanimous judgment of his countrymen for two generations after his death he was hailed as Pater Patriae; and the age which ...
— The Americanism of Washington • Henry Van Dyke
... Bethlehem. Had these shepherds not followed up the message their knowledge of their Messiah would have immediately been cut short. We hear divine messages and see heavenly visions enough, but too often we let them fade into forgetfulness and pass into nothingness. A message does us no good until it becomes action, the grandest vision that ever swept through our brain or illuminated our sky leaves no vestige of worth unless it is turned into conduct and ...
— A Wonderful Night; An Interpretation Of Christmas • James H. Snowden
... of friendly intercourse when it seemed we talked nothings and wandered and meandered among subjects, but always we had our eyes on one another. And afterwards I would spend long hours in recalling and analyzing those nothings, questioning their nothingness, making out of things too submerged and impalpable for the rough drags of recollection, promises and indications. I would invent ingenious things to say, things pushing out suddenly from nothingness to extreme significance. I rehearsed a ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... fortune and no future to offer you," said Josephine. "What he is, he is only through the friendship of Bonaparte. He has no estate, no importance, no celebrity. Were Bonaparte to abandon him he would fall back into nothingness and ...
— Queen Hortense - A Life Picture of the Napoleonic Era • L. Muhlbach
... glorious foliage drooped their branches, and dipped the ends in the glancing water. The bright sun shone overhead; the tendrils and waving grass were gay with blossoms; birds of lovely plumage sang sweetly; and in the distance, on the one hand, fading away into nothingness, were the glorious blue mountains, and away to ...
— The Adventures of Don Lavington - Nolens Volens • George Manville Fenn
... all," he continued, "the question is not whether they are intelligent or narrow, it is not my business to take the priest to pieces to discover under the consecrated rind the nothingness of the man; not my business to abuse his inadequacy since it is thoroughly suited to the understanding of the crowd. Would it not be, after all, more courageous and more humble to kneel before a being of whose brains ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... "benedictions." Next best to being with Christ Himself, I love to be with those who have His spirit and are yearning for more of His likeness. You speak of putting "deep and dark chasms between" yourself and Christ. He lets us do this that we may learn our nothingness, our weakness, and turn, disgusted, from ourselves to Him. May I venture to assure you that the "chasms" occur less and less frequently as one presses on, till finally they turn into "mountains of light." Get and keep a will for ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... alike seemed to vanish as their hurtling flight sent them rocketing on for distances inconceivably vast through a bleak and appalling Nothingness, where ...
— Zehru of Xollar • Hal K. Wells
... la chasse alone, and horses, and dogs, with each day no higher aim than its own mean pleasure. Ah, Paul!" she continued with sudden passion, "I would rather you were dead—dead and cold with me, than I should have to feel you were growing a rien du tout—a thing who will go down into nothingness, and ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn
... PETER came (That was the kindly Bishop's name), He heard these dreadful oaths with shame, And chid their want of dress. (Except a shell—a bangle rare— A feather here—a feather there The South Pacific Negroes wear Their native nothingness.) ...
— More Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... woman could see. Oh, how white and cold and still the distant mountains shone in the pallid light! Oh, how silent, peaceful, deserted, the far-away slopes and ridges over the prairie! Oh, how faint and far and glimmering were the night lights of the stars, dimmed into nothingness by the broad, brilliant, overwhelming radiance of the Queen of Heaven! Oh, how sweet, luring, love-lighting were those witching waltz strains floating out upon the breathless air! Oh, how warm and close was the pressure of his strong ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... themselves the primeval, or timeless, Something?—"What was the veiling cover of everything?"—they themselves ask. And they answer with another question—"Was it the water's deep abyss?" They think of it as "an ocean without light." "Then (say they) from the nothingness enveloped in empty gloom, Desire (Love) arose, which was the first germ of mind. This loving impulse the Sages, seeking in their heart, recognised as the bond between Being and Non-Being." How deep the plunge here into the sphere of abstract thought! Yet so subtle and forceful had been the mystic ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... conceit that misleads you!" said Ak, sternly. "You are a transient race, passing from life into nothingness. We, who live forever, pity but despise you. On earth you are scorned by all, and in Heaven you have no place! Even the mortals, after their earth life, enter another existence for all time, and so are your ...
— The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus • L. Frank Baum
... from her inner consciousness' was a bad headache after it was all over. It dawned upon her gradually that the world was being picked to pieces, and put together on new and, according to the talkers, on infinitely better principles than before, that religion was in a fair way to be reasoned into nothingness, and intellect was to be the only God. Jo knew nothing about philosophy or metaphysics of any sort, but a curious excitement, half pleasurable, half painful, came over her as she listened with a sense of being turned adrift into time and ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... sum of human life. Must I believe, must you believe, that all this fair scene is to end forever at death? That you, bound to each other by so many ties, are to be separated, and both of you to be divided from Zenobia, and all of us to fall into nothingness, silence, and darkness? Rather than that, would that the life we now enjoy might be immortal! Here are beautiful objects, among which one might be willing to live forever. I am never weary of the moon and her soft light, nor of the ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... together in the open doorway of the little house and watched the yacht's lights as they described a great curve through the darkness, then slowly faded into nothingness down the bay. Cherry drew herself closer ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... see that ignorance is the means of our intellectual pleasure? It is the solving of the problem that brings enjoyment—the solved problem has no further interest. So when all is known, the stimulus for action ceases; when all is known there is quiescence, nothingness. Perfect knowledge implies the peace of death, implies the state of being one—our pleasures are derived from action, from differences, ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... thee more of the wonders of these tombs that are my palace halls? If thou wilt, I can lead thee to where Tisno, the mightiest and most valorous King of Kor, in whose day these caves were ended, lies in a pomp that seems to mock at nothingness, and bid the empty shadows of the past do ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... Harry; and they say the poor thing can preach; forgive me what I have done to him, oh Lord! It is the weakness of man grasping the things of this world, to leave behind for the world's nothingness," says Mr. M'Fadden, as the woman leaves the room ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... window again and faced me, and her eyes were glowing with the light of love. Again for the moment we were face to face with the perils that menaced us from the outside, and before that consideration, all else faded to nothingness with Zara. A little while ago she had repudiated me, but all-conquering Love had stepped in again, had overpowered her, enthralled her, and I could see that she was more than ...
— Princess Zara • Ross Beeckman
... a great crisis has probably shared the old nurse's surprise at finding that smaller troubles, which for a while were reduced to nothingness, soon revive with our own ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... brain-mind evidence—grammar, microscopic examination of text and forms and so on—that Homer is a mere airy myth; but to do so you must be totally oblivious of the spiritual facts of style and poetry. Take these into account, and he rises with wonderful individuality from the grave and nothingness into which you have relegated him. The Illiad does not read like a single poem; there are incompatibilities between its parts. On the other hand, there is, generally speaking, the impress of a single creative genius. One master made the Homeric style. The Iliad, as ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... an affirmative force which does not belong to it. Consider what is meant by the negative. It is the absence of something. It is not-being, and is the absence of all that constitutes being. Left to itself, it remains in its own nothingness, and it only assumes form and activity when we give these to it by ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... several seconds before he could bring it into play upon the great thing that shook and tossed him about as though he had been a rat in the mouth of a terrier. But suddenly there was the sharp report of a firearm, and another of Professor Maxon's unhappy experiments sank back into the nothingness from which he ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... that observed in the same latitudes seven years previously. The narrow ribbon of light, contracting towards the sun, and running outward from it to a distance of thirty-five degrees; the unsubstantial head—a veiled nothingness, as it appeared, since no distinct nucleus could be made out; the quick fading into invisibility, were all accordant peculiarities, and they were confirmed by some rough calculations of its orbit, ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... who escaped at the former place tells a wonderful story of the strangeness of its coiling flow, and how he looked down from the church spire and saw the houses of the village rising like ghosts out of its inky nothingness. For a day and a half he remained there, weary, starving and sun-scorched, the earth under the blue sky and against the prospect of the distant hills a velvet-black expanse, with red roofs, green trees, and, later, black-veiled shrubs and gates, barns, outhouses, ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... winter—we can recommence operations with the Artesian ray; that is, if we think well to do so. You should stop this and take up something else. You have several enterprises which are very important and ought to be carried on. Take up one of them, and think no more for a few months of the nothingness which ...
— The Great Stone of Sardis • Frank R. Stockton
... like a statue, gazing into nothingness. Then she paced to and fro, her hands clenched on her breast. This was a secluded nook, where a bench had been built between two low-branching trees, on the bank of the stream. Pan stealthily slipped closer, so he could get clearer ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... stay saved—is hastening rapidly on to the tomb of the world's history, will pass in turn through that gloomy sepulcher of countless nations into the great inane, the eternal void, the all-embracing night of utter nothingness! With all our patriotism and scannel-piping, our boasting and our battlefields, our solemn Declarations and labored Constitutions, we are but ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... day before Christmas, Jane took up to Ray's room one of her trifles, a whip, whose suave and frothy nothingness was piled over the sweet plum-pulp at bottom. Ray lay on the outside of the bed, with his thick poncho over him; he looked at her and at her tray, played with the teaspoon a moment, then rolled upon his side and shut his eyes. Little Jane took a half-dozen steps about the room, reached ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... was more or less like a man: that is to say, he was an idiot. The importance of all other things dwindled into nothingness. His habits, which were as fixed as the stars at other times, took a complete vacation. He even forgot hunger, and the whistlers and gophers were quite safe. He was tireless. He rambled during the night as well as the day in ...
— The Grizzly King • James Oliver Curwood
... down on a prayer stool, left.] She flees from me, as I flee from my bad thoughts! Alone, forsaken—what more is there for me in life? Naught have I learned of life save its nothingness, and no wishes are left to me but evil ones. My soul would be like an empty shell were it not filled with her! My life—Ah, what has it been? [Pall pounds on floor.] What was that?—Ghosts in the ...
— Lucky Pehr • August Strindberg
... minutes, and he saw that, while Tayoga was unconscious, the flow of blood was still held in check by the bandages. Resuming his burden, he went on through the forest, a full quarter of a mile now, and the last sound of the battle sank into nothingness behind him. He was consumed with anxiety to know who had won, but there was ...
— The Rulers of the Lakes - A Story of George and Champlain • Joseph A. Altsheler
... kinds of love—one with strong wings which lift the soul to a dazzling perfection of immortal destiny,—the other with gross and heavy chains which fetter every hope and aspiration and drag the finest intelligence down to dark waste and nothingness. ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... nose beyond the shadowy yacht because he knew that he must allow for the current. Her eyes devoured him, and her heart sang. Plup-plup-plup-plup said the water. The oars plashed gently. Jenny saw the blackness gliding beside her, thick and swift. They might go down, down, down in that black nothingness, and nobody would know of it.... The oars ground against the edge of the dinghy—wood against wood, grumbling and echoing upon the water. Behind everything she heard the roaring of London, and was aware of lights, moving and ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... mental faculty was instantly concentrated upon the single sense of hearing. My conductor had left me. There was the sound of a closing door and of padded foot-falls that trailed off into nothingness; then silence. ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... a burdensome night. The prince turned on his bed repeatedly, and asked himself whether he had not been blind, and if he had not received sight that day for the first time in order to convince himself of his folly and nothingness. How differently during those night hours did the warnings of his mother appear to him, and the restraint of his father in enouncing the supreme will, and even the stern conduct ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... greatness. That a few defaced, dismantled, moss-grown or sand-choked fragments of these mighty buildings would one day be the only trace, the sole memorial of a rule and of nations that would then have past away forever, even into nothingness and oblivion, scarcely was anticipated by the haughty conquerors who filled those halls with their despotic presence, and entered those consecrated gates in the pomp of triumph to render thanks for bloody victories and warlike exploits which elated their souls in pride till they felt ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... passed—it throbbed itself away; the spiritual gusts of thought grew continually fainter, till, like the echoes of a dying harp, like the breath of a falling gale, they slowly sank to nothingness. Then wearied with an extreme of wild emotion Beatrice sought her bed again and presently ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... out and closed the door, and it must be confessed that Miss Minchin stood for a few moments and glared at it. What he had said was quite true. She knew it. She had absolutely no redress. Her show pupil had melted into nothingness, leaving only a friendless, beggared little girl. Such money as she herself had advanced was lost and ...
— A Little Princess • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... name of the Void, the Void would answer. He feared it—it meant that She would be swallowed also in the great gaping hollow of nothingness. He strained his ears for sounds of the living world—the spit of the fire, the fall of clinkers in the grate, the whisper of the wind stirring at the door. He tried to analyse his growing uneasiness. He was sure now that she had followed Antoine's ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... original projectors of these institutions that we gazed on the soul-exciting scene before us. We thought of the enchantments related in the Arabian Nights' Entertainments, and they faded away into nothingness compared with what ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... with it. There was a certain relief in facing the worst; yet he could not always face it. There was the trouble. Now and then a hope, which he told himself was futile, would spring unbidden to his heart, establish itself as a radiant guest. Yet presently it would depart, mocking him; or fade into nothingness leaving a blank ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... we have supposed, the man possessed real goodness; but it was largely goodness in the germ; it needed to be developed. It is only congenial with what we know of divine operations to believe that what is good will be developed, rather than that it will decay into nothingness. From that point of view a preliminary stage of progress seems ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... sustain the shock of considerable hazard with spirit and fortitude. But, in London, the feeling of self-importance is totally lost and suppressed in the bosom of a stranger. A painful conviction of insignificance—of nothingness, I may say—is sunk upon his heart, and murmured in his ear by the million, who divide with him that consequence which he unconsciously before supposed he possessed in a general estimate of the world. ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt
... brevity in verse 15. 'They followed vanity, and became vain.' The worshipper became like the thing worshipped, as is always the case. The idol is vanity, utter emptiness and nonentity; and whoever worships nothingness will become in his own inmost life as empty and vain as it is. That is the retribution attendant on all trust in, and longing after, the trifles of earth, that we come down to the level of what we set our hearts upon. We see the effects of that principle in the moral degradation of idolaters. Gods ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... that he could neither be mistaken nor deceived, that he saw everything, that he accomplished everything, and the illusions with which he was surrounded in regard to the facility of success and the means employed! The nothingness of absolute power, and of government by one alone, was thus revealed under the reign of the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... Epaminondas; so many armies, so many nations, that leave him so far behind them. No particular quality can make any man proud, that will at the same time put the many other weak and imperfect ones he has in the other scale, and the nothingness of human condition to make up the weight. Because Socrates had alone digested to purpose the precept of his god, "to know himself," and by that study arrived at the perfection of setting himself at nought, he only was reputed worthy the title of a sage. Whosoever ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... beaks are pointed with delight, Curved sharply with desire, The passionate direction of their flight, Clear and high, Stretches their bodies taut like humming wire. The cold wind blows into angry patterns the jet-bright Feathers of their wings, Their claws curl loosely, safely, about nothingness, They clasp no things. Direction and desire they possess By which in sharp, unswerving flight they hold Across an iron sea to the golden beach Whereon lies carrion, their feast. A shore of gold That birds wrought on a vase can ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Marjorie Allen Seiffert
... with our own vileness, be sensible of our misery, and annihilate ourselves, because the Divine Majesty only communicates itself to the humble. But St. Francis proposed to himself to explain that, when it pleases God to manifest Himself in some manner to a soul which is duly sensible of its nothingness, it is better impressed with its own nothingness, by the disproportion it sees between the Sovereign Being and His creature, which discovers to it a thousand imperfections which it was not previously aware of, as a ray of the sun penetrating into a room, discovers a multitude of atoms ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... that matchless passway. Over the hills which tumble steeply on either side soared the vast Andes of the clouds, hanging palpable in the sapphire of a summer sky. What height on height of craggy softness on those silver steeps! What rounded bosomy curves of golden vapour; what sharpened pinnacles of nothingness, spiring in ever-changing contour into the intangible blue! Man the finite, reveller in the explainable and the exact, how can his eye pierce or his speech describe the rolling robes of glory in which floating ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... beautiful as on a winter's evening, when dusk almost hides the body, and they seem to issue from nothingness with a note of intimacy seldom heard by day. Such an edge was there in Mary's voice when she greeted him. About her seemed to hang the mist of the winter hedges, and the clear red of the bramble leaves. He felt himself at once stepping ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... tried to hold the lean, spasmodic arms as they traced in the air the pompous rhythm of a march that moved on silent funereal pinions through the chamber. The woman stared threateningly at the picture on the wall, the picture of the skeleton which had come from nothingness to reveal nothingness to the living. The now distraught girl, her nerves crisped by her doubts, threw herself upon the bed, her fears ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... doubt whether there are other worlds beyond ours, and account it madness to say there is nothing. Nonentity is incompatible with the infinite entity of God. They lay down two principles of metaphysics, entity which is the highest God, and nothingness which is the defect of entity. Evil and sin come of the propensity to nothingness; the sin having its cause not efficient, but in deficiency. Deficiency is, they say, of power, wisdom, or will. Sin they place in the last of these three, because he who knows ...
— The City of the Sun • Tommaso Campanells
... imperishable spirit did not cease. It continued to exist, and, in its next incarnation, became the residing spirit of that apparitional body known as Darrell Standing's which soon is to be taken out and hanged and sent into the nothingness whither all apparitions go. ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... illusion. The breaking through this illusion is progress. Consciousness itself is built on pain. Life is an evil best cured by quenching the will to live. The world is a mistake—a stupendous blunder of the blind unconscious. From it there is no escape until the world is hurled back into nothingness by a supreme effort of the collective human will. To bring about this replunge into Nirvana is the goal of the world process. The vast scheme of nature, the slow growth of mind up the long scale of organic forms, the high intelligence that crowns the summit ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... its hollow breath over the city, and all things seemed to sleep in the embrace of nothingness. The cock-crow alternated with the strokes of the clocks in the church towers and the mournful cries of the weary sentinels. A waning moon began to appear, and everything seemed to be at rest; even Ibarra himself, worn out by his sad thoughts or by ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... others dim pinpoints of glowing color. It was a scene of unspeakable grandeur, but it was so awesomely mighty in its scope, one was afraid, and his soul shriveled within him as he looked at those inconceivable masses floating forever alone in the silence of the inconceivable nothingness of eternal cold and eternal darkness. One was awed, suppressed by their sheer magnitude. A magnificent spectacle truly, but one no man ...
— Invaders from the Infinite • John Wood Campbell
... he not pause to think very seriously when he remembers the fundamental axiom that 'out of nothing, nothing can come,' and that nothing which has once existed can ever be completely annihilated? At any rate the necessary deduction must be that the life of man ends in that nothingness whence everything in existence has proceeded. To live and to die according to this book is not highly profitable. I can easily reconcile myself to the idea of annihilation, as a man who knows how to value ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... laughing. The snarl had died from his face; a dull, listless indifference had taken its place—the look one sees on the face of a beaten dog, after the beating is over, when it is lying very still, its great eyes staring into nothingness, and one ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... alone. My brain is giddy. My pulse vibrates irregularly, and my heart beats with an audible distinctness. I am oppressed with a sense of my own nothingness—an atom, almost invisible, upon the ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... rope leaped into nothingness. Had there been a big express locomotive hitched to that line, and going at full speed, I do not think the line would have paid out ...
— Swept Out to Sea - Clint Webb Among the Whalers • W. Bertram Foster
... once thrown off and severed from the thinking source, which is the immortality promised by Mr. Frederick Harrison to the select specimens of humanity whose thoughts have any reproductive power. It is not a mere preference of nothingness, or unconscious absorption, to limitation that inspires the intense yearning of the Hindu mind for Nirvana. Even in the Upanishads there are many evidences of a contrary belief, while in the Sankhya the aphorisms of Kapila unmistakably vindicate the individuality of ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... mind, once freed, weighed the evidence with a pitiless logic, paid its own tribute—despite the anguish of the heart —to the pioneers of truth whose trail it followed into the Unknown, who had held no Mystery more sacred than Truth itself, who had dared to venture into the nothingness between the whirling worlds. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... propose in case there really is a door and an old Peter to present a purified passport to," the dying man said to me with a touch of his old whimsicality. "I give up, Greg; the soul that Charlotte possesses can't be put out into nothingness; and if she's got one I have too," he said, after a moment's fight for breath. "Hurry, all of you, to get my passport made out and bring the girl here to me. Quick, get her. There is ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... far below the Leech-Gatherer's has been reached, and mind and body alike are in their last decay, the life of the Old Cumberland Beggar, at one remove from nothingness, has yet a dignity and a usefulness of its own. His fading days are passed in no sad asylum of vicious or gloomy age, but amid neighbourly kindnesses, and in the sanity of the open air; and a life that is reduced to its ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... Marines bumped and jostled with each other as they crowded in. If they had been anything but Marines, their own heads might have been turned at the discovery of this sudden materialization of a building out of nothingness. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... delight? "O Lord God," I said, almost involuntarily, "thou art very rich. Thou art the one poet, the one maker. We worship thee. Make but our souls as full of glory in thy sight as this chasm is to our eyes glorious with the forms which thou hast cloven and carved out of nothingness, and we shall be worthy to worship thee, O Lord, our God." For I was carried beyond myself with delight, and with sympathy with Connie's delight and with the calm worship of gladness in my wife's countenance. But when my eye fell on Wynnie, I saw a trouble ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 2 • George MacDonald |
