"Out of nothing" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... France. Without the war of 1870-1871, Gambetta had never become what he did become. Place the naturally gifted child of intelligent parents among savages, and he becomes a savage. Whatever a man is, society has made him. Ideas are not creations that spring from the head of the individual out of nothing, or through inspiration from above; they are products of social life, of the Spirit of the Age, raised in the head of the individual. An Aristotle could not possibly have the ideas of a Darwin, and a Darwin could not choose ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... "Out of nothing nothing comes," remarked Leo, as the giant suddenly appeared from behind a rock, "but assuredly nothing can beat Chingatok in size or magnificence, which is more ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... the least Apprehension of a future Reckoning, and at last leaving not only his own Children, but possibly those of other People, by his Means, in starving Circumstances; while a Fellow, whom one would scarce suspect to have a humane Soul, shall perhaps raise a vast Estate out of Nothing, and be the Founder of a Family capable of being very considerable in their Country, and doing many illustrious Services to it. That this Observation is just, Experience has put beyond all Dispute. But though the Fact be so evident and glaring, yet the ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... its usual operations upon the fancy, by heightening every danger; representing the English and Dutch captains to be men incapable of hearing reason, or of distinguishing between honest men and rogues; or between a story calculated for our own turn, made out of nothing, on purpose to deceive, and a true, genuine account of our whole voyage, progress, and design; for we might many ways have convinced any reasonable creatures that we were not pirates; the goods we had on board, the course we steered, our frankly showing ourselves, and entering ...
— The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... of the Burkes, and an impatience seized me to know who won in the battle, Doc or the seventy-five acres. For it is a hard thing to make a farm out of nothing, even in fifteen years. So I hurried on, thinking of the Burkes. They used to have a certain magnificent barbarism about them that I liked. They were never vulgar, never immoral, but rather rough and primitive, ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... his wonder-working faith in the recuperative forces of his country when its fortunes were at their lowest ebb. With buoyancy and confidence he set himself the task of rescuing his fellow-countrymen when it looked as hopeless as that of Xenophon at Cunaxa. He created an army out of nothing, induced his men by argument, suasion, and example to shake off the virus of indiscipline and sacrifice their individual judgment and will to the well-being of their fellows. He enjoined nothing upon others that he himself was not ready to undertake, and he exposed ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... his heart there is no God." There is a grand relation between the eternal spirit and that eternal substance which lies behind and underneath all that is, and that relation is the relation between the "King Eternal" and that over which he presides and which he controls. So out of nothing nothing comes. ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, - Volume I, No. 9. September, 1880 • Various
... in politics, the law could not stop at the sheriff's office. It rubbed shoulders with big contracts and big financial operations of all sorts. The city was being built within a few years out of nothing by a busy, careless, and shifting population. Money was still easy, people could and did pay high taxes without a thought, for they would rather pay well to be let alone than be bothered with public affairs. Like hyenas to a kill, the public contractors gathered. ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... sum of their goodness and wisdom. To expect that men who do not honorably and intelligently conduct their private affairs will honorably and intelligently conduct the affairs of the community is to be a fool. We are told that out of nothing God made the Heavens and the earth; but out of nothing God never did and man never can, make a public sense of honor and a public conscience. Miracles are now performed but one day of the year—the twenty-ninth of February; and on leap year God is forbidden ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... time before she noticed him, and dimly perceived how vastly differed her homely suit and unstudied contour—painfully unstudied to fastidious eyes—from Ethelberta's well-arranged draperies, even from Picotee's clever bits of ribbon, by which she made herself look pretty out of nothing at all. Yet this negligence was his sister's essence; without it she would have been a spoilt product. She had no outer world, and her rusty black was as appropriate to Faith's unseen courses as were Ethelberta's correct lights and shades to ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... corporeal substance to have been the main pillar and support of Scepticism, so likewise upon the same foundation have been raised all the impious schemes of Atheism and Irreligion. Nay, so great a difficulty has it been thought to conceive Matter produced out of nothing, that the most celebrated among the ancient philosophers, even of those who maintained the being of a God, have thought Matter to be uncreated and co-eternal with Him. How great a friend material substance has been ...
— A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge • George Berkeley
... had towers to be built and apparatus transplanted, the supply of oil must be maintained and the men fed, in the same inaccessible and distant scenes, a whole service with its routine ... had to be called out of nothing; and a new trade (that of light-keeper) to be taught, recruited ...
— The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls • Jacqueline M. Overton
... of it. I know nothing about mad people, but I am sure that no honest man ever invented a story out of nothing and then became crazy because it did not turn ...
— A Cigarette-Maker's Romance • F. Marion Crawford
... strong enough to read by. Besides, there was nothing to read. One could only lie and think and think. And I was a lifer, and it seemed certain, if I did not do a miracle, make thirty-five pounds of dynamite out of nothing, that all the years of my life would be spent in the ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... critical man, who bore in his person traces of the battle he had fought. There were those who called him lucky; but these had lain softly and fared well while he starved and wrought, winning his way by inches until he built up out of nothing the splendid ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... original creation. His work, literary, musical, or graphic is original creation on a miniature scale, and in this it differs from that of the engineer, which is constructive, or that of the scientist which is analytical; for the artist in a sense creates something out of nothing, and therefore starts from the stand-point of simple feeling, and not from that of a pre-existing necessity. This, by the hypothesis of the case, is true also of the Parent Mind, for at the stage where the ...
— The Dore Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... come out of nothing; all the visible structure of the universe had its origin in the movements of the atoms that constituted it, and conditioned its infinite changes. The atoms, by a useful but perhaps too convenient ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... that, supposing the theory correct, that all was originally in the Deity, and that the Universe has proceeded forth from Him, and not been created by Him out of nothing, the idea of the Universe, existing in the Deity before its out-flow, must have been as real as the Deity Himself. The whole Human race, or Humanity, for example, then existed in the Deity, not distinguished into individuals, but as a Unit, out of ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... in our selves, and receive pleasure from the objects which surround us, sufficient to indear to us the possession and injoyment of Life, we cannot from thence but infer, that this Wise and Powerful Being is also most Good, since he has made us out of nothing to give us a Being wherein we find such Happiness, as makes us very unwilling to ...
— Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian life • Lady Damaris Masham
... heightening of what is already fine, and obviously fine in itself. And this particular quality of interpretation has its value too as criticism. For, while it gives the utmost value to what is implicitly there, there at least in embryo, it cannot create out of nothing; it cannot make insincere work sincere, or fill empty work with meaning which never could have belonged to it. Brahms, at his moments of least vitality, comes into a new vigour of life; but Strauss, played by ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... vaguely tinted in Indian ink, drawn upon strips of gray paper most accurately cut but without the slightest attempt at a frame; this is all: not a seat, not a cushion, not a scrap of furniture. It is the very acme of studied simplicity, of elegance made out of nothing, of the most immaculate and incredible cleanliness. And while following the bonzes through this long suite of empty halls, we are struck by their contrast with the overflow of knick-knacks scattered about our rooms in France, and we take a sudden dislike to the profusion ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... char-a-banc—the crank-shaft's broken," Ferdinand said to me, as he asked me for the tenth time to get up beside him; "I've got no one, and I'm going to win this race. If you could conjure up a new crankshaft out of nothing, you would still be three behind the last in, and all the town out to laugh at you. Get up, Lal, and have done with it. I tell you I knew ...
— The Man Who Drove the Car • Max Pemberton
... 144), and there is also a version attributed to Dryden. page 260 13.—Lope Felix de Vega Carpio (1562-1635) was the most fertile playwright ever known to the world. Alone he created the Spanish drama almost out of nothing. Born at Madrid, where he spent most of his life, Lope was an infant prodigy who fulfilled the promise of his youth. His first play was written at the age of thirteen. He fought against the Portuguese in the expedition of 1583 and took part in the ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... the little nation started to restore its old home life, everything had to be replaced. "It was not only the political conditions which had altered, but social life itself. At a moment's notice, and practically out of nothing, a new administration had to be organised and the diverse organs of the national life to be improvised. Hardly anything valuable of the preceding regime could be utilised. In this connection, it is interesting to observe the different fortunes of a conquered province. When ...
— Bulgaria • Frank Fox
... mystery and particularly that of man. At the blast of His mouth were the rest of the creatures made, and at His bare word they started out of nothing. But in the frame of man He played the sensible operator, and seemed not so much to create as to make him. When He had separated the materials of other creatures, there consequently resulted a form ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... that it is considered the great art in a gentleman's letter that he should put a great deal of matter in few words, while a lady piques herself on making an excellent letter out of nothing. If your letters were shorter than mine, they were not, on that ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... struggle for existence. But in trying to make an occasional and partial cause universal and ultimate, it has undertaken the impossible task of bringing the greater out of the less; which really means bringing their difference out of nothing—and this is creation with the First Cause left out; that is, spontaneous creation. It is from first to last an "aggregation" theory, and has to face the insupportable burdens which such a theory brings with it. Haunted by a false analogy drawn ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... to watch through the window. What a singular being he is! I think he spends hours in that boat, and what he does I can't conceive. There it is, quietly anchored, and there is he in it. I never saw anybody but myself who could get up so much industry out of nothing. He has all his housework there, a broom and a duster, and I dare say he has a cooking-stove and a gridiron. He sits a little while, then he stoops down, then he goes to the other end. Sometimes he goes ashore in that absurd little tub, with ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... well as men, can find or make a party question, and quarrel out of any thing or out of nothing. There was a Scotch pedlar, who used to come every Thursday evening to our school to supply our various wants and fancies. The Scotch pedlar died, and two candidates offered to supply his place, an English lad of the name of Dutton, and a Jew boy of the name of Jacob. ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... to themselves—All heaven and earth must have had a beginning, and they cannot have grown out of nothing, for out of nothing nothing comes. They must have been made in some way. Perhaps they ...
— The Good News of God • Charles Kingsley
... and that thing called fame, is fearfully slow. Oftenest he has achieved his best when the first critic speaks kindly or savagely of him. What, indeed, at best, do those blind leaders, but zealously echo a sentiment already in the public heart,—which they vainly endeavor to create (out of nothing) by any awe-inspiring formula ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... "Made out of nothing. You see the absurdity, for nothing must have first existed. I am glad to see you laugh. Do you think that nothingness could ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... vase. He does not create ideas cut of nothing, any more than the carver creates the separate blocks of wood. The writer may coin his own soul into substance for his stories, but creating out of one's mind and creating out of nothing are two very different things. The writer observes himself, notices how his mind works, how it behaves under given circumstances, and that gives him material exactly the same in kind as that which he gains from observing the working of ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... citizens are wearing brassarts showing they are deputies of some sort or members of law-and-order committees, and there is a certain joyous freedom in the walk of every one. Here, in one corner of this vast empire, a revolt lacking all signs of terrorism, growing out of nothing into a sudden burst of indignation, knocked over the most absolute of autocracies. Just to look, it is hard to believe it true. As a Socialist said to me to-day: "The empire was rotten ready. One kick of a soldier's boot, and the throne with all its ...
— World's War Events, Vol. II • Various
... the window, and meditates upon quail-shooting. His Excellency the Governor, questions the possibility of adding another despatch to the hundred and fifty already composed in illustration of the art of making despatches, as Soyer makes soup, out of nothing; and oppressed by the subject, becomes dormant in his chair of state; the clerks in the neighbouring offices no longer exhibit the uplifted countenance which, as justly observed by Sallust, distinguishes man from all other creatures; ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... the two elements which enter into the one Absolute Idea as contradictories, and both together combine to form a complete notion of bare production, or the becoming of something out of nothing,—the unfolding of real existence in its lowest form, that ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... was a Consensus about it. It was the very first one. It sat six days and nights. It was then delivered of the verdict that a world could not be made out of nothing; that such small things as sun and moon and stars might, maybe, but it would take years and years if there was considerable many of them. Then the Consensus got up and looked out of the window, and there was the whole outfit, spinning and ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... was completely puzzled. I would have mentioned it before, only it seemed to be making a mountain out of nothing." ...
— The Pit Prop Syndicate • Freeman Wills Crofts
... young man did go. He climbed aboard the stranded craft—a forlorn picture she made, lying on her side in the mud—and was surprised to find how much had been manufactured "out of nothing." Her seams, those which the sun had opened, were caulked neatly; her deck was clean and white; she was partially rigged, with new and old canvas and ropes; and to his landsman's eyes she looked almost ...
— The Woman-Haters • Joseph C. Lincoln
... conjuring match. The challenge was instantly accepted. The Gipsies placed themselves in a circular form, and both being in the middle commenced with their conjuring powers to the best advantage. At last the visitor proposed the making of something out of nothing. This proposal was accepted. A stone which never existed was to be created, and appear in a certain form in the middle of a circle made on the turf. The master of the gang commenced, and after much stamping with his foot, and the gentleman warmly exhorting him ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... we take this house or home as a test, we may very generally lay the simple spiritual foundations of the idea. God is that which can make something out of nothing. Man (it may truly be said) is that which can make something out of anything. In other words, while the joy of God be unlimited creation, the special joy of man is limited creation, the combination of creation ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... and space, as having for us the value of reality. Nor shall we, if we are to escape scepticism, be willing to admit that these appearances have no sure relation to ultimate reality. We must not try to uncreate the world in order to find God. We were created out of nothing, but we cannot return to nothing, to find our Creator there. The still, small voice is best listened for amid the discordant harmony of life ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... out of nothing, and tells them not whence they come and whither they go. They have only to go their way; ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... genius, who has labored long and hard, Till success has crowned his research, should receive a just reward. The Machine's a great invention, that's continually clear, Out of nothing but corruption making millions every year— Out of muck and filth of cities making dollars neat and clean— Where's the fellow who invented the ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VII. (of X.) • Various
... their reward hereafter; and if there be no hereafter, they can be but with the infidel in his eternal sleep, having had the assistance of an exalted hope, through life, without subsequent disappointment, since (at the worst for them) 'out of nothing, nothing can arise, not even sorrow. But a man's creed does not depend upon himself: who can say, I will believe this, that, or the other? and least of all, that which he least can comprehend. I have, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... essential life, who has not the Power by which he lives one with him, holding pure and free and true the soul he sent forth from the depths of his being. I repent me of the ignorance wherein I ever said that God made man out of nothing: there is no nothing out of which to make anything; God is all in all, and he made us out of himself. He who is parted from God has no original nothingness with which to take refuge. He is a live discord, an anti-truth. He is a death fighting against life, and doomed to endless ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... no fools in the society?—and where shall he hear the weightiest things debated, and not a great many empty weak things offered, out of which nothing can be learned, and from which nothing can be deduced?—for 'out of nothing, nothing can come.' ...
— The Complete English Tradesman (1839 ed.) • Daniel Defoe
... looked about the circle of attentive faces. "That's all. But it's enough, isn't it? To come out of nothing, going nowheres, and run into a dirty Indian who says: 'By Jove, that's the first decent cup of tea I've had in ten years!' And then along comes this Terhune and says that he ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... the nearest fixed star is pretty much the same from the top of one ant-hill in a wood as from the top of the next one, though the one may be a foot higher than the other. I suppose that we have all come out of nothing, and are anything, simply because God is everything. If He were to withhold His upholding and inbreathing power from any of us for one moment, we should shrivel into nothingness like a piece of paper calcined in the fire, and go back into that vacuity out of which His fiat, and His ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... either; though he agreed with Pythagoras in his belief in the metempsychosis, in the influence of numbers, and in one or two other points; and with the Eleatics in disbelieving that anything could be generated out of nothing. Aristotle speaks of him as very much resembling in his opinions Democritus and Anaxagoras. He was the first who established the number of four elements, which had been previously pointed out one ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... theory alleges that the earth, and the sun, and the moon, and man, and the animals were "created" by God, instantaneously, by word of mouth, out of nothing. ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... the ship from Earth, still invisible, returned to the approximate spot where they had destroyed the invulnerability of the Giant. Then suddenly, out of nothing, the Solarite appeared. In an instant a dozen of the tiny two-man planes darted toward it. Just that they might recognize it, Arcot shot it up a bit higher with the aid of the keel rockets at one-third power. The typical reddish ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell
... training in military affairs. He did not represent the will of his country, for his country had no will. His country really did not exist. Bolivar created it. He was obeying no commands but those of his conscience. He was making something out of nothing, and in his campaigns it was the flash of genius which ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... for him. He'd have the herd on the run in no time if he was to come out to-night. Never knew a human being who could stir up so much trouble out of nothing as he can. We're coming up with the herd now. Be careful where you ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in Texas - Or, The Veiled Riddle of the Plains • Frank Gee Patchin
... his ways, my dear: always dreaming about new inventions, and making fortunes out of nothing. I do hope your uncle will not listen to any of ...
— The Weathercock - Being the Adventures of a Boy with a Bias • George Manville Fenn
... keeping all appointments, as I go my round in the obvious world, a bit of Chaos and old Night seems to linger on inside me; a dark bewilderment of mind, a nebulous sea of speculation, a looming of shadowy universes out of nothing, and their collapse, as in ...
— More Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... were many in the land who loved the memory of Chaka, and remembered that Dingaan had murdered him and Umhlangana also. For now that Chaka was dead, people forgot how evilly he had dealt with them, and remembered only that he was a great man, who had made the Zulu people out of nothing, as a smith fashions a bright spear from a lump of iron. Also, though they had changed masters, yet their burden was not lessened, for, as Chaka slew, so Dingaan slew also, and as Chaka oppressed, so did Dingaan oppress. ...
— Nada the Lily • H. Rider Haggard
... let things go on as they are.' But it was the pretension to a part in the name of Ormont which so violently offended the democratic aristocrat, and caused her to resent it as an assault on the family honour, by 'a woman springing up out of nothing'—a woman ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... (whose most famous and successful opponent was Athanasius, the writer of this biography) maintained that the Son of God was not co-equal and co-eternal with the Father, but created by Him out of nothing, and before the world. His opinions were condemned in the famous Council of ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... absorbing practically all his balance. Eileen was delighted with it. They spent that evening in the nearest approach to festivity that they had known for several years. It was, as it were, the crown of the long waiting for something out of nothing. All those little acerbities which creep into the manner of two married people who are always trying to round the corner fell away, and they sat together in one large chair, talking and laughing over the countless tricks which Providence—that 'fat chough'—had played ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... labours asserted their claim. He had put four years of his life into making this farm out of nothing, four years of incredible toil, energy, and young enthusiasm. He had a good dwelling and spacious corrals, an orchard started, a truck garden, a barley field, a pasture, cattle, sheep, chickens, his horses—all his creation from nothing. One evening at sundown he found his ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... of an army springing up out of nothing, the spectacle of the monumental work of military organization being pushed on to success in spite of mistakes, arrested the attention of all ...
— Porto Rico - Its History, Products and Possibilities... • Arthur D. Hall
... sure I don't know what you mean, Cyprian, by poetry without rhyme or verse, any more than I should if you talked about pictures that were painted on nothing, or statues that were made out of nothing. How can you tell that anything is poetry, I should like to know, if there is neither a regular line with just so many syllables, nor a rhyme? Of course you can't. I never have any thoughts too beautiful to put in verse: nothing can be ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... employment of reasoning, but they furnish a basis upon which the reason can occupy itself with profit. They are a safeguard against those utopian schemes which would shatter our world and try experiments in creation out of nothing. ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... he beat up with water and poured into the hot pan when the pork was done. He watched it until it hardened a little on one side, when he flung it up into the air and caught it in the pan again. There is an art in making palatable flapjacks out of nothing but flour and water. When the meager breakfast was ready, he awakened Grenfell, who sat ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... administration, their bad pay and uncertain outlook, the elementary teachers of this country are amazingly efficient. And it is not simply that they are good under their existing conditions, but that this service has been made out of nothing whatever in the course of scarcely forty years. An educational system to cover an Empire is not a thing that can be got for the asking, it is not even to be got for the paying; it has to be grown; and in the beginning it is bound to be thin, ragged, forced, crammy, text-bookish, superficial, ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... admiration. We like to hear about their public careers and the intimate side of their exceptional lives is of decided interest to us. This I think is especially true where the noted ones are among our public entertainers, the player-folk, who bring so much joy and happiness into the world out of nothing—creators ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... saw a family have such fun. They could make up stories and pretend things and invent games out of nothing. And my Fairies were so fond of them that I couldn't keep them away from the dolls' house. They would go and have fun with Meg and Peg and Kilmanskeg and Gustibus and Peter Piper, even when I had work for them to do in ...
— Racketty-Packetty House • Frances H. Burnett
... the Deity, makes us (if we may use such an expression) witnesses of the formation of the universe. He tells us that the Eternal, tired of his inaction, one fine day took it into his head to create a world that was necessary to his glory. To effect this, he forms matter out of nothing; a pure spirit produces a substance which has no affinity to himself; although this God fills all space with his immensity, yet still he found room enough in it to admit the universe, as well as all the material ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... God, man cannot see it in its holy of holies and live. And it is, like God, increate, springing out of nothing, yet the maker of all things—ever changing yet the same yesterday, to-day and ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... rather remember the same by his children that were the fruit of his body. For, said he, they surpass and are far more excelling creatures of God than all the fruits of trees. By them we see God's Power, Wisdom, and Art, who hath made them all out of nothing, hath given them in one year life and all members, so exquisitely hath created and will maintain and preserve them. Yet, notwithstanding, we do not much regard it; nay, we are in such gifts of God blind and covetous, as commonly ...
— Selections from the Table Talk of Martin Luther • Martin Luther
... to intrude upon her thus, out of nothing apparently but sheer moth-like incapacity to keep away! The church footpath indeed was public property, and Miss Harden's burdens had cried aloud to any passing male to help her. But why in this ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... an axiomatic truth that "out of nothing, nothing comes," and it has often been asserted by scoffers that the Bible teaches generation "from nothing." We readily agree that translations into the modern languages promulgate this erroneous ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... or of mental activity; as constitution and circumstances determine? We believe no logical intellect will question it. To think otherwise is to entertain in a disguised form the old fallacy of the perpetual-motion schemers—that it is possible to get power out of nothing. ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... symbolical. So far as I could gather it had never been here before—at any rate no one could be found who had seen it here or in the neighbourhood, and it seemed obvious that its sudden emergence, as it were, out of nothing must have some high and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, April 5, 1916 • Various
... at last, their goal was in sight; and incontinently they flung themselves down, gasping, upon the iron-hard rock, and gazed entranced upon the glorious vision—thrice glorious to them after all that they had suffered—until another great snow-cloud evolved itself out of nothing and swooped down upon them in a final ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... able to contradict [the senses], wholly founded as it is on the senses? And if they are not true, then all reason as well is rendered false." The first principle in nature is asserted by Lucretius to be that "Nothing is ever gotten out of nothing." "A thing never returns to nothing, but all things after disruption go back to the first bodies of matter." If there were not imperishable seeds of things, atoms, "first-beginnings of solid singleness," then, Lucretius ...
— The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry • M. M. Pattison Muir
... war the resources of peace, and although the other nations of Europe have tried and trodden every path of force or folly in fruitless quest of the same object, yet we still expect to find, in juggling tricks and banking dreams, that money can be made out of nothing, and in sufficient quantity to meet the expenses of a heavy war by sea and land. It is said, indeed, that money cannot be borrowed from our merchants as from those of England. But it can be borrowed from our people. They will give you all the necessaries of war they produce, ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... city not made with hands—eternal in the heavens. For all this time-world, as a wise man says, is but like an image, beautifully and fearfully emblematic, but still only an emblem, like an air image, which plays and flickers in the grand, still mirror of eternity. Out of nothing, into time and space we all came into noisy day; and out of time and space into the silent night shall we all return into the spirit world—the everlasting twofold mystery—into the light- world of God's love, or the fire-world of His anger—every ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... twelfth-century windows break the French tradition. They had no antecedent, and no fit succession. All the authorities dwell on their exceptional character. One is sorely tempted to suspect that they were in some way an accident; that such an art could not have sprung, in such perfection, out of nothing, had it been really French; that it must have had its home elsewhere—on the Rhine—in Italy—in Byzantium— ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... St. Luke's history. Of the particularity which we allege, many examples may be found in all the Gospels. And it is very difficult to conceive that such numerous particularities as are almost everywhere to be met with in the Scriptures should be raised out of nothing, or be spun out of the imagination without ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... out of nothing by a personal God—is no longer regarded as tenable by intelligent individuals, though miracle and special providence are often included in accounting for the vicissitudes of life, just as the so-called scientist superficially ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... could get so much fun out of nothing as you seem able to," said the brakeman, who was particularly down on tramps. "I reckon the super'll give you something to laugh about directly that won't seem so ...
— Cab and Caboose - The Story of a Railroad Boy • Kirk Munroe
... king used to go to hide away from his scheming mother and his argus-eyed minister. The genius of Colbert was severely taxed to supply the means for Louis' magnificent tastes and for his foreign wars, at the same time. Even Colbert could not create money out of nothing. The burden must rest somewhere, and just as surely must ultimately be borne ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... utmost, he could only collect a portion of what was due from those whose names were on the subscription paper. No one felt the inconvenience of this more than the clergyman's wife. She was a good manager, and had a wonderful faculty for making "one dollar go as far as three, and getting up meals out of nothing," as her husband often remarked. But it must be confessed, that with the keen appetites brought to them on the wings of the prairie winds, the little household sometimes rose from the ...
— The Cabin on the Prairie • C. H. (Charles Henry) Pearson
... does Creation mean? A. To create means to produce out of nothing. God alone has this power, and He ...
— Baltimore Catechism No. 3 (of 4) • Anonymous
... honourable Cardinal Rohan, by this time a man of fifty, and the fanatical adorer of Cagliostro, with his philosopher's stone, his crystal gazers, his seeresses, his Egyptian mysteries, and his powers of healing diseases, and creating diamonds out of nothing. ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... parts are not compact. But if perhaps they think, in other wise, Fires through their combinations can be quenched And change their substance, very well: behold, If fire shall spare to do so in no part, Then heat will perish utterly and all, And out of nothing would the world be formed. For change in anything from out its bounds Means instant death of that which was before; And thus a somewhat must persist unharmed Amid the world, lest all return to naught, And, born from naught, abundance thrive anew. ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... talent," du Chatelet had said one day (for Lucien and the Baron had made up their quarrel); "a plot below the surface rouses no one's attention. Intrigue, moreover, is superior to talent, for it makes something out of nothing; while, for the most part, the immense resources of talent only ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... Bihan," I said impatiently, "translate it, won't you? You and Max Fortin make a lot of mystery out of nothing, it seems." ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... thought she, "I shall understand myself. I shan't again be troubled by things that come out of nothing, and mean I ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... out of nothing," cried Helen. "If you break confidence with your husband, that confidence will never, never ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... father. Say that I must stay. You can certainly talk before me. So you think me very silly. What you say is astonishing! business, placing money in a bank a great matter truly. Men make mysteries out of nothing. I am very pretty this morning. ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... the deep and worlds are born. Worlds wax and wane, suns crumble into dust, But matter pregnant with immortal life, Since erst the white-haired centuries wheeled the vast, Hath lost nor gained. Who made it, and who made The Maker? Out of nothing, nothing. Lo The worm that crawls from out the sun-touched sand, What knows he of the huge, round, rolling Earth? Yet more than thou of all the vast Beyond, Or ever wilt. Content thee; let it be: Know only this—there ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... it in any other way before—quite to the contrary—but nevertheless he saw strong evidences of it now, and it made him very bitter in his feeling toward her. How could she be guilty of any such conduct toward him? Had he not picked her up out of nothing, so to ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... man who went about that mill, often saying, "I hain't got no book l'arnin' like the rest of you." He was the man who owned the mill. He had made it with his own genius out of nothing. He had become rich and honored. Every man in the mill loved ...
— The University of Hard Knocks • Ralph Parlette
... I have discussed that which we know as things: it remains that I should speak of that which we know as truths. For example, when we think that it is impossible to make anything out of nothing, we do not imagine that this proposition is a thing which exists, or a property of something, but we take it for a certain eternal truth, which has its seat in the mind (pensee), and is called a common ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... "Out of nothing? That would not be simple at all, and if any one could prove it he would make a sensation in ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... the fixation of free nitrogen exceeds the utilization of nitrogen in animal growth, then the soil will be enriched in that element, although with the same growth of plants it would be enriched more rapidly without pasturing; for animals are not made out of nothing. Meat, milk, and wool are all highly ...
— The Story of the Soil • Cyril G. Hopkins
... Italian went into ecstasies over this irreverent trifling, Delsarte did not disdain to caricature it, and gave us a most comical little performance. Here again we see how he could transform everything, and make something out of nothing! ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... tumultuous when he had further elucidated and finished. To get something out of nothing made a strong appeal to Prouty. It was criminal for Sudds to waste his abilities in a small community. They wondered ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... minds were full. The attempt was bold, and the Pleiad did not pretend to consult the taste of the vulgar. "The obscurity of Ronsard," says M. Guizot, in his Corneille et son Temps, "is not that of a subtle mind torturing itself to make something out of nothing; it is the obscurity of a full and a powerful mind, which is embarrassed by its own riches, and has not learned to regulate the use of them. Furnished, by his reading of the ancients, with that which was wanting in our poetry, ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... Everything he takes up he wearies of; he gets pleasure out of nothing. And the pity of it is, he's no fool; if anything, he's too ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... away pleasantly. The Disagreeable Man was scarcely himself to-day; or was it that he was more like himself? He seemed in a boyish mood; he made fun out of nothing, and laughed with such young fresh laughter, that even August, the grave blue-spectacled driver, was moved to mirth. As for Bernardine, she had to look at Robert Allitsen several times to be sure that he was the same Robert Allitsen she ...
— Ships That Pass In The Night • Beatrice Harraden
... make a kitchenmaid out of nothing," said Mr. Linton gloomily. "I hope to hear of one in a day or two; I ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce
... intervenes in the flux, but evolution is due to an absolute Effort which exists in vacuo and is simplicity itself; and this Effort, without having an idea of what it pursues, nevertheless produces it out of nothing. ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... much out of nothing if you allow that blatherskite to disturb you," said the Governor, with mild reproof. "Pay no attention to him. Now to my business with you! I'd like to have you dine with me this evening. I have some serious matters to talk over with you alone—and the executive chamber, here, ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... Beyond all thought fain to redeem thee, torn 1000 More timeless from me sorrowing than the dream That was thy sister; so shalt thou be too, Thou but a vision, shadow-shaped of sleep, By grief made out of nothing; now but once I touch, but once more hold thee, one more kiss This last time and none other ever more Leave on thy lips and leave them. Go; thou wast My heart, my heart's blood, life-blood of my life, My child, my nursling; now this breast ...
— Erechtheus - A Tragedy (New Edition) • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... been created out of nothing. Look at that thick roll of hard flesh on your strong arm! That was not always there: you could not climb a tree when I first saw you. But you willed and tried and willed and tried; and your will created out of nothing the roll ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... went. But when at length he reached home, it was with several ancient volumes, among the rest "Clement Marot," in pockets and hands. Ere an hour was over, he was in delight with the variety of dainty modes in which, by shape and sound, a very pretty French something was carved out of nothing at all. Their fantastic surprises, the ring of their bell-like returns upon themselves, their music of triangle and cymbal, gave him quite a new pleasure. In some of them poetry seemed to approach the nearest possible to bird-song—to unconscious seeming through most conscious art, ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald
... depreciated paper money always involves. The state whose financial distress introduced the evil, sees a great portion of its revenues melt away before its eyes;(930) while in what concerns its outlay, nothing is more calculated to mislead it than such an imagined creation out of nothing. And a thing which greatly contributes to this its the frightful sensitiveness of a depreciated paper currency in the presence of complications of foreign politics, a quality which may cause the government as many inconveniences ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... needs, if God our Saviour was the one thought of our hearts, then it might be unnecessary that we should ask for anything we need. But seeing we take our supplies as a matter of course, feeling as if they came out of nothing, or from the earth, or our own thoughts, instead of out of a heart of love and a will which alone is force, it is needful that we should be made feel some at least of our wants, that we may seek him who alone supplies all of them, ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... after, to whom faith clings, and in whom all our hopes are centred (and such is the personal God of Revelation),—and on this hypothesis the world is not God, but is distinct from Him, having had a beginning, and being created out of nothing,—or there is only one supreme form of existence, and the world is eternal, and not distinct from God; there is absolutely but One, and this eternal One comprehends all, and is itself all in all; so that there is no where any real and essential ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... last night. To-day we again spent in improving our billets. The sailor is always known as the handy man, but I doubt if he would have a look in even with amateur Tommies like ourselves. We made scrapers for each barn door out of nothing, mats to scrape our boots on out of straw, roadways over muddy places out of brushwood and tins, &c., and incinerators out of mud. We could easily ...
— Letters from France • Isaac Alexander Mack
... school but little, and had not profited much by what instruction he had received while there. It was an idea early adopted by him that a "self-made man" was the highest type of the race, and to him a self-made man was one who worked like the original Creator—made everything out of nothing and called ...
— The Evolution of Dodd • William Hawley Smith
... would be hard to find the right word in a European language. The temperament and theory described as pessimism are European. They imply an attitude of revolt, a right to judge and grumble. Why did the Deity make something out of nothing? What was his object? But this is not the attitude of Eastern thought: it generally holds that we cannot imagine nothing: that the world process is without beginning or end and that man must learn how to make the ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... all that work has been produced by small insects, and, so to speak, out of nothing, is indeed wonderful," observed Mr Henley as we strolled along together. "Do you know, Marsden, I have often thought that it is intended that we should learn from these coral reefs what great results are produced in the moral ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... did not express the time of day, the climate, the period of the world it was meant to illustrate, or had not this character of wholeness in it. His eye also does justice to Rembrandt's fine and masterly effects. In the way in which that artist works something out of nothing, and transforms the stump of a tree, a common figure into an ideal object, by the gorgeous light and shade thrown upon it, he perceives an analogy to his own mode of investing the minute details of nature with an atmosphere of sentiment; and in pronouncing Rembrandt to be a man of genius, feels ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... violates every canon of thought which in the palpable world we are accustomed to respect; something as alien to, and inconceivable by, us as contradiction in terms, the destructibility of force or matter, or the creation of something out of nothing. This, which when writ large maddens and kills, writ small is our meat and drink; it attends each minutest and most impalpable detail of the ceaseless fusion and diffusion in which change appears to us as consisting, and which we recognise as growth ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... see some one else. It was one of the wretched things about the little man that his conversation was nearly always ambiguous, and that he never asked straight-forwardly for anything he wanted. And yet, look what a head he had for business! He had made one immense fortune out of nothing at all in the boom-time, and had lost it when the slump came. Now he seemed on the way to make a fortune again. His estancia lay on the river-bank, and was independent of the old heart-breaking system ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... all, perhaps, against the Affghans themselves. It must be known to many of our readers—that, about the opening of the present century, a rumour went traversing all India of some great Indian expedition meditated by the Affghans. It was too steadfast a rumour to have grown out of nothing; and our own belief is—that, but for the intestine feuds then prevailing amongst the Suddozye princes, (Shah Soojah and his brothers,) the scheme would have been executed; in which case, falling ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... ceremonies that prevailed in the time of Confucius, (and before that period all seems to be fable and uncertainty) may be pretty nearly ascertained from the writings that are ascribed to that philosopher. He maintains in his physics, that "out of nothing there cannot possibly be produced any thing;—that material bodies must have existed from all eternity;—that the cause (lee, reason) or principle of things, must have had a co-existence with the things themselves;—that, therefore, this cause is also eternal, infinite, indestructible, without ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... of competition with speeches all they like, but they can't put it out. Because why? Well, because this life thing is going on, and competition is the only way it can get on. Call it Nature if you want to. Nature built star dust out of nothing, and built us out of star dust, but she ain't through; she's still building. Old Evolution is still evoluting, and her only tool is competition, the same under the earth and on the earth, the same out in the sky as ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... or his friendship: he is born our friend; while his eyes are still closed, already he believes in us: even before his birth, he has given himself to man. But the word "friend" does not exactly depict his affectionate worship. He loves us and reveres us as though we had drawn him out of nothing. He is, before all, our creature full of gratitude and more devoted than the apple of our eye. He is our intimate and impassioned slave, whom nothing discourages, whom nothing repels, whose ardent trust and love nothing can impair. He has solved, in an admirable ...
— Our Friend the Dog • Maurice Maeterlinck
... causes. They do not evolve conduct out of nothing. The child does this, the man does that, because of something; because of many things. If we do not like the way people behave, and wish them to behave better, we should, if we are rational beings, study the conditions that produce ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... ever got hold of him, when the chap hadn't a halfpenny to fly with, but was a most ordacious fellow at speculating and inventions, and was always up to something new. One day he had a plan for making moist sugar out of bricks—then soap out of nothing—and sweet oil out of stones. At last Clayton hears of him, and hooks him up, gets him to the chapel; first converts him, and then goes partners with him in the spekylations—let's him have as much money as he asks for, and because soap doesn't come from nothing, and sugar from bricks, and sweet ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... papa, "you did take care of mamma, and get up a dinner out of nothing, sure enough; and now we'll eat the dinner, which I am sure ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... entrusted to the directors and officers of corporations. It is a simple and elementary principle that all values are created by the productive activity of capital, labour and ability in industrial operations of one kind and another. No wealth comes out of nothing, but all must be produced and distributed, and what one gets by indirection another loses or fails to get. The personal profit of these speculative operations in which the capital, credit and power of corporations are used ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... difference between getting more out of a thing than there is in it and creating something out of nothing? ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume 1, January, 1880 • Various
... much warning Drew had before the speaker lurched from the bar straight for him. What had happened, how this had sprung up out of nothing, the Kentuckian could not understand. But he knew well that he was under an attack delivered with a purpose, and with all the dirty tricks of a no-rules, ...
— Rebel Spurs • Andre Norton
... and Mohammedan but really transformed it from religious and ethical discussions into metaphysical systems. In the Bible and similarly in the Koran we have a purely personal view of God and the world. God is a person, he creates the world—out of nothing to be sure—but nevertheless he is thought of doing it in the manner in which a person does such things with a will and a purpose in time and place. He puts a soul into man and communicates to him laws and prohibitions. Man must obey these laws because they are the will of God and are good, and ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... the greater part of his life in building up a reputation out of nothing. As time goes on, he becomes more and more anecdotically experienced, and, if possible, even less actual. He will have lost his nerve for riding, and a sight which gets daily weaker will have caused him to abandon even the pretence of handling his gun; but he will seek a recompense by becoming ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 16, 1890 • Various
... shaking of a kaleidoscope formed of fragmentary reminiscences. I remember once, in some momentary access of ambition, trying to invent a play. I occupied several hours of a long country walk in, as I believed, creating out of nothing at all a dramatic story. When at last I had modelled it into some sort of coherency, I stepped back from it in my mind, as it were, and contemplated it as a whole. No sooner had I done so than it began to seem vaguely familiar. "Where have I seen this story before?" I asked ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... does not tell us. Whether he created (as doubtless he could have done if he chose) this world suddenly out of nothing, full grown and complete; or whether he created it (as he creates you and me, and all living and growing things now) out of things which had been before it—that the ...
— The Gospel of the Pentateuch • Charles Kingsley
... hope and assurance. It was a racial mold of mind, and one of extraordinary strength and persistence,—and one totally unjustified by facts in what were then the present and future. But I do not believe such molds can ever be fudged up out of nothing: ex nihilo nihil is as true here as elsewhere. So we must look for the cause and formation of this mold in the past. Something, I think, within that first cycle of Welsh history must have impressed it on the Welsh mind: some ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... friends, nay my masters: still, since I cannot quite say nothing of them I must say the plain truth, which is this; never in the whole history of art did any set of men come nearer to the feat of making something out of nothing than that little knot of painters who have raised English art from what it was, when as a boy I used to go to the Royal Academy Exhibition, to ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... signed the mortgage. Clark gave him fifty dollars a month and his grub, and had promised more if he succeeded. He had found iron ore. It was good enough to win the bet, but was it good enough for Clark? and if it was not good enough for Clark the mortgage would have to be met out of nothing. ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... ocean, towards which you march all day and get no nearer; the gorgeous momentary blaze of sunset colours in the west; the rustle of the wind through the short twilight when the west is a pure pale green and the east the darkest blue; and the downward swoop of the planets out of nothing to the earth. The inheritor of the other places dreamed himself back into his inheritance as he tramped to and fro, forgetful of his blindness and parched with desire as with a fever—until unexpectedly he heard the blackbirds and the swallows bustling and piping in the garden, and knew ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... criticism at the door of this sacred place as if it were the public square. I understood the discontent that knit my father's brows and the alacrity with which he descended the church steps. Tonton saw and came to us—so fresh, so young, she was indeed the queen of beauty and fashion. Out of nothing Tonton could work wonders. Her dress to-day was of camayeu the pattern of which was bunches of strawberries—the very same stuff as our dresses; but how had she made it to look so different? And her hat! It was a new marvel of her invention. She had taken a man's felt hat and entirely ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... protoplasm. They stated the view with a rash emphasis, until one is forced to ask whether a mind which is originally nothing at all, can absorb, or as psychologists say, "apperceive" anything whatever. Nothing comes out of nothing, and nothing ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... higher form of a life from a lower one is in accordance with our observation and experience. It is therefore proper to be believed. The attempt to get it from that which has absolutely no life is like trying to get something out of nothing. The millionth part of a farthing put out to interest at ten per cent, will in five hundred years become over a million pounds, and so long as we have any millionth of a millionth of the farthing to start with, our getting as many million pounds as we have a fancy for is only a question ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... of faith . . . is that whereby it is believed that there is in any wise but one God, who by His own Word first of all sent forth, brought all things out of nothing; that this Word called His Son, was . . . brought down at last by the Spirit and the power of God the Father into the Virgin Mary, made flesh in her womb, ...
— The Virgin-Birth of Our Lord - A paper read (in substance) before the confraternity of the Holy - Trinity at Cambridge • B. W. Randolph
... Why did you go off together yesterday, and stay away for such a time, leaving us to entertain your guests? You're busy with something that you don't want us to know about and I'd just like to find out what it is. It always irritates me when people make mysteries out of nothing.' ...
— The Adventure League • Hilda T. Skae
... developed between her and the man she loved, everything was a burden. Even her religion, though she clung to it with an ever-increasing tenacity, failed at this period to bring her much comfort. Every night it seemed to her that the day had been one long and dreary struggle to make something out of nothing; and in the morning the night, too, seemed to have been alive with conflict—All Thy waves and Thy ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... been referred to as the one "who made The Ladies' Home Journal out of nothing," who "built it from the ground up," or, in similar terms, implying that when he became its editor in 1889 the magazine was practically non-existent. This is far from the fact. The magazine was begun in 1883, and had been edited by Mrs. Cyrus H. K. Curtis, for six years, under her maiden ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... anecdotes, they turned with infinite zest to one of Glynn's outrageous flights. Glynn had not read much in his short life, and his memory was nothing to boast of, but his imagination was quite gigantic. He could invent almost anything; and the curious part of it was, that he could do it out of nothing, if need be. He never took time to consider what he should say. When called on for a story he began at once, and it flowed from him like a flood of sparkling water from a fountain in fairy realms. Up in the clouds; ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne
... Agreeable to this conception is the further Thomistic teaching that sanctifying grace is not directly created by God, but drawn (educta) from the potentia obedientialis of the soul.(989) Not even the Scotists, though they held grace to be created out of nothing(990) claimed that ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... the Greenback party, in the first place, I am not a believer in miracles. I do not believe that something can be made out of nothing. The Government, in my judgment, cannot create money; the Government can give its note, like an individual, and the prospect of its being paid determines its value. We have already substantially resumed. Every piece ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... would have to reject every good influence—which always comes from outside—and become completely absorbed in the cult of one's own soul. One would even have to object to being born, and would have to create one's self out of nothing. It has always been regarded as the splendid privilege of great men to exert an ennobling influence on others—why, therefore, should the influence of a beloved woman on her ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... derive it from nothing was manifestly impossible; and, because it is no less repugnant that the more perfect should follow and depend upon the less perfect than that something should come forth out of nothing, I could ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... probability, according to my notion, is against it, since general laws seem sufficient for that end.... The light of Nature affords us not a single argument for a future state: this is the only one, that it is possible with God, since He who made us out of nothing can surely re-create us; and that He will do this we humbly hope." He published an ode against atheism, with which he has strangely enough ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... 'to-morrow he will purge away,' are truly humorous. While delivering a lecture on the philosophy of language, Socrates is also satirizing the endless fertility of the human mind in spinning arguments out of nothing, and employing the most trifling and fanciful analogies in support of a theory. Etymology in ancient as in modern times was a favourite recreation; and Socrates makes merry at the expense of the etymologists. The simplicity of Hermogenes, ...
— Cratylus • Plato
... 'destroyed' by Baiame. I do not wish to credit savages with thoughts more abstract than they possess. But that their thought can be abstract is proved, even in the case of the absolutely 'primitive Arunta,' by their myth of the Ungambikula, 'a word which means "out of nothing," or "self-existing,"' say Messrs. Spencer and Gillen.[6] Once more, I find that I have spoken of some savage Beings as 'omnipresent' and 'omnipotent.' But I have pointed out that this is only a modern ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... thou didst ever make tragedies out of nothing," said Hyacinth, struggling to disguise hysterical tears with airy laughter. "But I am right glad all the same that you are come; for this gentleman has put a scurvy trick upon me, and brought me here on pretence of a gay assembly that ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... he was creating among his employes, he moved about, accompanied by his manager, making last suggestions, giving final instructions, and radiating fond, farewell glances at all the loved details of the business he had built out of nothing. ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... otherwise in another, but the Self-same, and the Self-same, and the Self-same, Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty, didst in the Beginning, which is of Thee, in Thy Wisdom, which was born of Thine own Substance, create something, and that out of nothing. For Thou createdst heaven and earth; not out of Thyself, for so should they have been equal to Thine Only Begotten Son, and thereby to Thee also; whereas no way were it right that aught should be equal to Thee, ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... in size and color, till we can take a farm-house for a white marble palace, and leafless woods with sunset clouds behind them for enchanted gardens hung with golden fruit. But the most gorgeous effects are, as is usual with air-castles, created out of nothing,—that is, nothing more substantial than air, mist, and sun- or moon- or star-beams. Fine times the imagination has, riding on purple and crimson rays, and building Islands of the Blest among vapors that have just risen from the turbid waters of the Mississippi! No Loudon or Downing ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... philosophers, unable to comprehend how something could be produced out of nothing, supposed a matter pre-existent to the Earth in its present shape, which afterwards received form and order from some powerful cause. According to them, God was not the Creator, but the Architect of the universe, in ranging and disposing the elements in situations most suitable ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... feel like wishing we had got the Camel here, though he would be no good without the galley and his tools. Not a bad chap to have, though, Mr Poole, if we was to land in a sort of Robinson Crusoe island. There's worse messmates at a time like that than a chap as can knock up decent wittles out of nothing; make a good pot of soup out of a flannel-shirt and an old shoe, and roast meat out of them knobs and things like cork-blocks as you find growing on trees. Some of them cookie chaps too, like the Camel, are precious ...
— Fitz the Filibuster • George Manville Fenn
... and acknowledge hence the truth. The Psalmist speaks of us all as fellows or partakers of the Lord, but were he one of things which come out of nothing and of things generated he himself had been one of those who partake. But since he hymned him as the eternal God, saying, "Thy throne, O God, is forever and ever," and has declared that all other things partake of him, what conclusion must we draw, but that he ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... think that was nearly the first thing to be discovered, or at least to be thought of, concerning plants,—namely, how and of what they are made. We say they 'grow.' But you know that they can't grow out of nothing;—this solid wood and rich tracery must be made out of some previously existing substance. What is the substance?—and how is it woven into leaves.—twisted ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin |
