"Emptiness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... those benumbed lips would not quiver. No! everything was motionless; the very seaweed, among which the surf had cast him, seemed to have congealed; even the gulls had flown away—there was not a fragment anywhere, not a plank or any broken rigging. There was emptiness everywhere ... only he—and I—and the foaming sea in the distance. I cast a glance behind me; the same emptiness was there; a chain of hillocks on the ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... art which arose with Winckelmann towards the close of the last century, a gospel of esthetics was preached. Its apostles were chiefly Germans, and among them Schiller and Goethe are not inconspicuous names. The latter, before his long life was closed, began to see the emptiness of such teachings, and the violence perpetrated on the mind by forcing on the religious sentiment the food fit only for ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... the pioneers were keenly conscious of their isolation. The emptiness of the land seemed to press upon their breasts, hindering free breathing. Moreover, their nerves were still jangling as a ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner
... freeholds whose masters might be equally likely to see the prudence of being in their watch-towers when the English allies were passing. Barred across by the shadows of its mighty trees, the great road stretched away mile after mile in cool emptiness. At rare intervals, a mounted messenger clattered over the stones, his hand upon his weapon, his eyes rolling sharply in a keen watch of the thicket on either side. Still more rarely, foraging parties swept through the morning stillness, lowing cows pricked to a ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... to lengthen intolerably, to stretch out into a desert of emptiness, to become fateful with a bitterness too poignant to be uttered. Crowther said no more. He had had his say. He waited with unswerving patience ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... thing. And may not her uneasiness, her eagerness to question and dispute, arise from a sort of intellectual hunger? Ah, from such hunger, which many women must suffer throughout their lives, from want of literary food,—from such an emptiness of the soul arise disquiet, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... creative touch and a magnetic presence such as few women possess. I believe that she could not be for twenty-four hours in the barrenest and ugliest room possible, without contriving to diffuse a certain enchantment through all its emptiness. ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... passed over as frivolous. And yet, but for one reason, to that whole European world whose progress we are now inheriting, this view would have seemed not only not untenable, but even obvious. The emptiness of the things of this life, the incompleteness of even its highest pleasures, and their utter powerlessness to make us really happy, has been, at least for fifteen hundred years, a commonplace, both with saints and sages. The conception that anything in this life could of itself ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... between the musical numbers, her feet crossed, her hands reposing on her lap. But in the intimacy of their life her grey, unabashed gaze forced upon him the sensation of something inexplicable reposing within her; stupidity or inspiration, weakness or force—or simply an abysmal emptiness, reserving itself even in the moments of ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... not to bring about a juster treatment of the Christians.[386] He wished to represent their cause as the good contrasted with the bad, wisdom as opposed to error, truth in contradistinction to outward seeming, hypocrisy, and pretentious emptiness. His "Address to the Greeks" begins with a violent polemic against all Greek philosophers. Tatian merely acted up to a judgment of philosophers and philosophy which in Justin's case is still concealed.[387] Hence it was not possible ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... girls happen to be right. Your planet was settled by men whose ships crossed the emptiness of space as your caroj pass over the desert. Your people have forgotten about that and lost the science and knowledge you once had, but in other worlds ...
— The Ethical Engineer • Henry Maxwell Dempsey
... of capital being, indeed, the stone of Sisyphus with a vengeance, crushing in its recoil). But, throughout, the old ideas of the cloud power and cloud feebleness,—the deceit of its hiding,—and the emptiness of its banishing,—the Autolycus enchantment of making black seem white,—and the disappointed fury of Ixion (taking shadow for power), mingle in the moral meaning of this and its collateral legends; and give an aspect, ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... deeper—lips no more red—teeth no whiter—nor was the perfect oval of her sun-kissed cheek any the more perfect. Yet, there was something—the indefinable something that marks the transition of a beautiful girl from beautiful girlhood to glorious womanhood.... He felt a strange emptiness within him; it was almost as though he were appalled by ...
— A Fool There Was • Porter Emerson Browne
... could have been audible where she stood above the hubbub of music, laughter, and stamping feet that rose from below. It filled the night with uproar. Nor was there anything but emptiness in the narrow side-street into ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... which, forms of discomfort and annoyance, linger on to this day. The playhouse, in short, was almost a place of physical torture, and it is still rarely in Paris a place of physical ease. Add to this the old thinness of the school of Scribe and the old emptiness of the thousand vaudevillistes; which part of the exhibition, till modern comedy began, under the younger Dumas and Augier, had for its counterpart but the terrible dead weight, or at least the prodigious prolixity and absurdity, of much, not to say of most, of the romantic and melodramatic ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... said, "I guess you don't." His emptiness bowed out before a wave of bitterness. He had rested his hand on the gate, as close to hers as he had dared. Now he saw that while it was inches away from hers in one sense, it was light years away in another. He removed it angrily. "Business always comes first ...
— The Servant Problem • Robert F. Young
... not taking hands, they swung slowly through the unpeopled emptiness, leaving a tiny scattering of tracks behind, the blue-white ice firm under their feet through a light film of snow. The ice-boat was out of sight, the sprightly and unexpurgated ballad of "Amos Moss," rendered in the closest ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... could not be consoled in this way. He could see no reason why his ray acting upon the emptiness of a cavern should produce the effect he beheld. Moreover, if the ray had revealed a cavern of considerable extent he could not expect that it could now pass through it, for the limit of its operations was almost reached. His electric cumulators would cease to ...
— The Great Stone of Sardis • Frank R. Stockton
... pipe—as dry and unsympathetic as, contrariwise, the singer was warm-hearted and full of the very sap of human kindness. The minister was so absorbed in his own full-hearted praise that he was scarce conscious that he was almost alone in the chill emptiness of the church. Indeed, a strange feeling stole upon him, that he heard his wife's voice singing the solemn gladness of the last verse along with him, as they had sung it together near forty years ago when she had first come to the hill kirk ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... us, life in you.'—In us, emptiness, weakness, suffering, pressure, perplexity. In you life—life—life! As if Paul would say, 'the more I am pressed above measure, the more the life of Jesus is abundant in its outflow, and in its quickening of other lives.' This is the apostolic life. Through the Eternal Spirit, Christ offered Himself ...
— Parables of the Christ-life • I. Lilias Trotter
... there were some of those who landed there, who, on seeing the pale cliff behind, believed, with a deep curiosity, that some very sacred and beautiful thing must there be enshrined. But it was the emptiness of the further land, Hugh thought, that made it imperative to guard the mystery. In that bare land indeed he himself seemed to pace, bitterly pondering; he would even kneel on the bare rocks, and hold out his hands in intense entreaty to the God who had made him, and who withdrew Himself so relentlessly ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... arctic storm was crashing in a mighty fury, as if striving to beat down the little cabin that had dared to rear itself in the dun-gray emptiness at the top of the world, eight hundred miles from civilization. There were curious waitings, strange screeching sounds, and heart-breaking meanings in its strife, and when at last its passion died away and there followed a strange quiet, the two men could feel the frozen earth under their feet ...
— The River's End • James Oliver Curwood
... he takes of death, and the lofty scorn he displays towards his calumniators, are as a prophecy on his own destiny when received among immortal names, and the poisonous breath of critics has vanished into emptiness before ...
— Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mary W. Shelley
... this luxurious apartment to herself. Something about its air of rich privacy, its diffusion of that sympathetic quality in other countries so conspicuously absent from the public show-room, seemed to emphasize its present emptiness. It was as though the flowers, the carpet, the lounges, surrounded their visitor's solitary advance with the mute assurance that they had done all they could toward making the thing "go off," and that if they ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... our very council bringest thou Children of reprobation and perdition? Darkness thy deeds and emptiness thy speech, Such images thou raisest as buffoons Carry in merriment on festivals; Nor worthiness nor wisdom would display To public notice their deformities, Nor cherish them nor fear them; ...
— Count Julian • Walter Savage Landor
... dim, their vessel being already farther away; and then, all at once, the men of the Marie found they had nothing to push against, nothing at the end of their poles—all spars, oars, odds and ends of deck-lumber, were groping and quivering in emptiness, till they fell heavily, one after the other, down into the sea, like their own arms, lopped off ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... result of this inability to communicate with one another is that every product of their co-operative action bears the stamp of discord, not only because it fails to meet their real needs, but because of the very emptiness of those all-powerful words and notions already mentioned. To the misery already at hand, man thus adds the curse of convention—that is to say, the agreement between words and actions without an agreement between the feelings. Just as, during ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... chuckled, "an' I do hope Miss Ann ain't gonter take away her appletite for dinner by eatin' all this toas' an' drinkin' this whole pot er tea, kase I tell you now ol' Billy's stomic air done stuck to his back with emptiness." ...
— The Comings of Cousin Ann • Emma Speed Sampson
... repose, took his departure homewards with the dervish. Ample stores of all necessaries for her accommodation had been laid in, and slaves male and female were left for her attendance and protection. Not many days, had elapsed when an incident occurred, clearly proving the emptiness of human caution against the predestination of fate. The prince of Eerauk being upon a hunting excursion outrode his attendants, and missing his way, reached the gate of the cavern leading to the mansion, which was guarded by two black slaves, who ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 4 • Anon.
... prisoner, marched with other prisoners seventy-five miles to Danville, on thirteen crackers. They travelled from there to Andersonville, six days by rail, on four crackers a day, and, as a consequence of the rations, came in due course of time to a general sense of emptiness, and an incorrigible tendency to think of roast beef, boiled chicken, fried oysters, and other like dainties; and many of the prisoners, after battling awhile with the emptiness and the mental tendency, fell ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... along to noontime. Ere noontime came I was consumed with gnawing pains of emptiness. As nearly as I might judge, I contained naught save vast hollow spaces and acoustics and vacuums and empty, echoing, neglected convolutions. Sorely was I tempted to relax the rigors of the just-inaugurated regime; nobly, though, I resisted ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb
... tempted by the frivolities of a fashionable social life that lives by its vanity, its excitement, its rivalry and flirtation. Not that all fashionable society is open to such reproach, but its tendency is to lightness and emptiness; and we rarely find really valuable men who seek it. Therefore a lady who would make her house attractive to the best society must offer it something higher than that to which we may give the generic title fashion. Dress, music, dancing, supper, are delightful accessories-they ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... down the stairs, curtains were drawn back, and Maggie was sitting, quite suddenly, in a large desert of gold and red plush, with emptiness on every side of it and a hungry-looking crowd of people behind a wooden partition staring at her in such a way that she felt as though she had no clothes on. She gave a hurried glance at these people ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... scruples to the winds. Even the fear that Aniela might be unhappy loving me must give way before the great truth, great as the universe, that the presence of Love fills the life; gives sustenance to it, and is a hundred thousand times worth more than emptiness and ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... force which directs, subdues and uses matter; and in prayer we have already seen that we place ourselves in communication with the Central Force of the universe, acquiring power we should not otherwise possess, and replenishing our emptiness from an inexhaustible store. But if thought, mind, will, are that which lies behind all physical accomplishment, from the simplest to the most wonderful; and if by an exercise of the same faculty we may actually secure ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... fields under a blazing sun, the cattle seeking shade wherever it was to be had, crowding at the water-holes, browsing early and late and frequenting the cooler canons during the heat of the days. And nights of stars and a vast silence and emptiness. ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... still rang in his ears,—the warmth of her kiss still lingered on his lips,—he loved her! ... he worshipped her! ... why, why had she left him "lost" as she herself had said, in a world that was mere emptiness without ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... lighter than a leaf Unwittingly whirled onward by a brief Autumnal eddy; but when the fatal door Suddenly yielded him to life once more, And issuing to the all-consoling skies He turned to seek the sunlight in her eyes, He clutched at emptiness—she was not there; And the dim warder answered to his prayer: "Only once have I seen the wonder wrought. But when Alcestis thus her master sought, Living she sought him not, nor dreamed that fate For any subterfuge would swing my ...
— Artemis to Actaeon and Other Worlds • Edith Wharton
... of vanities, and all is vanity! Let us raise the veil of deception that shrouds the emptiness of human joy. Alvira has now gratified her heart's desires in everything she could have under the sun. She had beauty, wealth, and fame, but she was like the pretty moth that hovers around the flame of the candle, and finds its ruin in the touch of the splendor it loves. Poor Alvira was another ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... a moment after the throwing had ceased. "He has gone round to the back. Keep as you are. We take cover now." He pressed behind the arras of an extemporized wardrobe, and the spirit of emptiness and desolation seemed once more to reign over ...
— Four Max Carrados Detective Stories • Ernest Bramah
... cruiser and carried into Isle Dieu. Two weeks later the vessel, crew, and passengers were released, but the sassafras, the beaver skins, and the lumber went to heal and warm and house Frenchmen instead of Englishmen, and Thomas Weston's pockets still cried out with their emptiness. Happily for the world, however, the Frenchmen did not appreciate the "Relation," and it went peacefully on in Robert Cushman's mails, and reached good George ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... appeared a work from the pen of the brilliant Norwegian writer, Laura Marholm, called "Woman, a Character Study." She was one of the first to call attention to the emptiness and narrowness of the existing conception of woman's emancipation and its tragic effect upon the inner life of woman. In her work she speaks of the fate of several gifted women of international fame: The genius, Eleanora Duse; the great mathematician and writer, ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... band of resolute men and women offered prayer to Him whose is the earth and the fulness, or the emptiness, thereof. ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... shoulder of a Kendah man, I drew nearer to see what passed between them, for my curiosity overcame my faintness. For quite a long while she stared at him, till suddenly her eyes began to change. It was as though a soul were arising in their emptiness as the moon arises in the quiet evening sky, giving them light and life. At length she spoke in a slow, hesitating voice, the tones of which I remembered ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... The emptiness, the stillness were oppressive. Once I heard footsteps coming, rhythmical steps that neither hurried nor dragged, and seemed to mount endless staircases without coming any closer. I realized finally that I had not quite turned off the tap, and that the lavatory, ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... that he had often discussed with his friend the Mayor the philosophy of money. "I recollect very well," he said, "once entering into the question with him, when I was twenty years younger than I am now, and saying that I saw a great deal of emptiness about this money-getting; that many were striving for that which they thought would make them happy, but that it was like a bubble upon the water—no sooner caught than burst.... Had I," he afterwards said, "been of noble birth, or traced my origin (like some in this room) to those who came in ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... Commissary business was "dead busted," our afflicted Commissary would tell us there was nothing, with such a rueful visage, that it made us sorry we did not have something to give him, and made us feel our own emptiness all the more, that it ...
— From the Rapidan to Richmond and the Spottsylvania Campaign - A Sketch in Personal Narration of the Scenes a Soldier Saw • William Meade Dame
... was struck in the opening scene: when Antigone and Ismene, robed all in white, entered together by the royal doorway and stood upon the upper plane of the great stage, alone—and yet so filled it that there was no sense of emptiness nor of lack of the ordinary scenery. Again, the setting was not an imitation, but the real thing. The palace from which the sisters had come forth rose stately behind them. Beside the stage, the branches of the fig-tree waved ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... done. This settles it. They used to fetch and carry for me, and now . . . I've licked their boots, have I? I'm their man, their tool, their chattel. It's the bottom rung of the ladder of shame. I sound with my foot, and there's nothing underneath but the black emptiness of damnation. Ah, Deacon, Deacon, and so this is where you've been travelling all these years; and it's for this that you learned French! The gallows . . . God help me, it begins to dog me like my shadow. THERE'S a step to take! And the jerk upon your spine! How's a man to die ...
— The Plays of W. E. Henley and R. L. Stevenson
... mind remained unallayed. Was all my life to be a hunger and a questioning? I complained of my teachers, who stuffed my head with facts and gave my soul no crumb to feed on. I blamed the stars for their silence. I sat up nights brooding over the emptiness of knowledge, and ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... the feet of the Frenchman who has to speak of 1793,—the terrible year of the modern epoch! The delirium of the Terror haunts most of the revolutionary historians, and the choicest examples in all literature of bombast, folly, emptiness, political immorality, inhumanity, formal repudiation of common sense and judgment, are to be found in the rhapsodies which men of letters, some of them men of eminence, call histories of the Revolution, or lives of this or that actor ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... refining discipline, which would else have been borne with benefit, is rendered unbearable, and so misses its end. Excess of government invariably defeats itself by driving away those to be governed. And if over all who desert its entertainments in disgust either at their emptiness or their formality, society thus loses its salutary influence—if such not only fail to receive that moral culture which the company of ladies, when rationally regulated, would give them, but, in default of other relaxation, are driven into habits ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... on its pavements, or the streams of vehicles solidifying or liquefying in its streets. The august groups of Westminster and Parliament did not seem in themselves spectacular; they needed the desertedness of night, and the pour of the moon into the comparative emptiness of the neighborhood, to fill them out to the proportions of their keeping in the memory. Is Trafalgar Square as imposing as it has the chance of being? It is rather scattered and spotty, and wants somehow the magic by which Paris moves ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... divisions, as the times do brawl, Are in three heads: one power against the French, And one against Glendower; perforce a third Must take up us: so is the unfirm king In three divided; and his coffers sound With hollow poverty and emptiness. ...
— King Henry IV, Second Part • William Shakespeare [Chiswick edition]
... are of marble. One side of any room intended for noonday retirement is generally laid open to a quadrangle, in the centre of which there dances the jet of a fountain. There is no furniture that can interfere with the cool, palace-like emptiness of the apartments. A divan (which is a low and doubly broad sofa) runs round the three walled sides of the room. A few Persian carpets (which ought to be called Persian rugs, for that is the word which indicates their shape and dimensions) are sometimes ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... consumptive as his purse, His aching head did wine and women curse; His fortune ruin'd and his wealth decay'd, 5 Clamorous his duns, his gaming debts unpaid, The youth indignant seiz'd his tailor's bill, And on its back thus wrote with moral quill: 'Various as colours in the rainbow shown, Or similar in emptiness alone, 10 How false, how vain are Man's pursuits below! Wealth, Honour, Pleasure—what can ye bestow? Yet see, how high and low, and young and old Pursue the all-delusive power of Gold. Fond man! should all ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... symptoms mentioned, indigestion may also be accompanied by gastric pain or by uneasiness at the pit of the stomach. It may be a sense of fulness or tightness, or a feeling of distention or weight, or again, a feeling of emptiness, goneness or sinking. Now and then there are burning, tearing, gnawing, dragging sensations under the breast-bone; and there is a general complaint of a capricious appetite, heartburn, vomiting, nervous headache, neuralgia and cold ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... lived through the game of Christmas solitaire in a big city, and I feel as relieved as a man just getting out of a dentist's office. He's minus a few molars, and aches considerable, but he's full of a pleasing emptiness. ...
— Colonel Crockett's Co-operative Christmas • Rupert Hughes
... some twelve months of his ex-royal exile! The memories of all this folk, flown guests and masters of the still-abiding palace-chambers, haunt us as we hurry through. They are but filmy shadows. We cannot grasp them, localise them, people surrounding emptiness with more than withering ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... too frivolous an animal to present to wise Minos. I wish Mercury were here; he would damn him for his dulness. I have a good mind to carry him to the Danaides, and leave him to pour water into their vessels which, like his late readers, are destined to eternal emptiness. Or shall I chain him to the rock, side to side by Prometheus, not for having attempted to steal celestial fire, in order to animate human forms, but for having endeavoured to extinguish that which Jupiter had imparted? Or ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... had made Hatty her special charge and duty; but now there was a gap in her daily life, a sense of emptiness and desolation. There was no need now to hurry through her morning's task that she might sit with Hatty. When she went out, there was no Hatty to watch for her return and listen to all her descriptions of what she had seen. At night, when Bessie went upstairs, she would creep ...
— Our Bessie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... principalities and powers! Fellow-feeling was all-pervading as this moonlight, which she had said would be the same in Germany—as this white ghostly glamour that wrapped the trees, making the orange lamps so quaint and decoratively useless out in the narrow square, where emptiness and silence reigned. He looked around into her face—in spite of bistre and powder, and the faint rouging on her lips, it had a queer, unholy, touching beauty. And he had suddenly the strangest feeling, as if they stood ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... early youth, he had to encounter disappointments, mortifications, disenchantments, deep moral suffering; then the constant warfare of envy, resulting in cruel, unceasing slanders: then, all the philosophical sadness arising in great minds, the best endowed and the noblest, from the emptiness of earthly things; then that unslakable thirst for the true, the just, the perfect; that sort of nostalgia which the noblest souls experience, because their home is not here, because reality disgusts them, from ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... flatteries, enmity, and guile Murmuring submission, and bald government, 605 (The idol weak as the idolater), And Decency and Custom starving Truth, And blind Authority beating with his staff The child that might have led him; Emptiness Followed as of good omen, and meek Worth 610 Left to ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... waves dashing themselves against the rocks. I had told John that he should be my cave man, and should seize me in his arms and carry me whither he would. I felt somehow that for my development I wanted to get as close to nature as ever I could—that my mind seemed to be reaching out for a great emptiness. But I looked over all the hotel and steamship folders I could find and it seemed impossible to get good accommodation, so we came to New York. I had a great deal of shopping to do for our new house, so I could not be much with John, but I felt it was not right to neglect him, so I drove ...
— Winsome Winnie and other New Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock
... learn to help himself, for she dropped to the ground, and went wading about in the wet grass and mud, and at length flew off without giving him a morsel. Then the disappointed youngster cuddled up to a brother crow baby, and both lifted up their voices and lamented the emptiness of ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... Laou-tsze affirm that Confucius was very roughly handled by his more ascetic contemporary, who looked down from his somewhat higher standpoint with contempt on the great apostle of antiquity. It was only natural that Laou-tsze, who preached that stillness and self-emptiness were the highest attainable objects, should be ready to assail a man whose whole being was wrapt up in ceremonial observances and conscious well-doing. The very measured tones and considered movements of Confucius, coupled with a certain admixture of that pride which apes humility, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... fury, bent alone with eager haste To swallow it; so dropp'd the loathsome cheeks Of demon Cerberus, who thund'ring stuns The spirits, that they for deafness wish in vain. We, o'er the shades thrown prostrate by the brunt Of the heavy tempest passing, set our feet Upon their emptiness, that substance seem'd. They all along the earth extended lay Save one, that sudden rais'd himself to sit, Soon as that way he saw us pass. "O thou!" He cried, "who through the infernal shades ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... rocky plateau. But it was shrinking, crawling into itself. Spots of light were in the murk overhead; there seemed a distant circular horizon of emptiness around us. ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... been now eighteen months in the bank, and had never even mentioned the name of a fellow clerk. He was one of those youths who take the only possible way for emptiness to make itself of consequence—that of concealment and affected mystery. Not even now but for his father's request, would he have presented his bank friend to him or ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... waterfall: you think you will bestow a little serpent of a gift from my stolen treasures to comfort me. You will comfort me with a lock of Camillo's hair, that I may have it on my breast to-night, and dream, and wail, and writhe, and curse the air I breathe, and clasp the abominable emptiness like a ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... one which should be held steadily in view. For the labourer the food must be in part solid, requiring mastication and insalivation, and not rapid of digestion. Food, however nutritious, which is too quickly digested, is soon followed by a sense of hunger and emptiness, and consequent sinking and debility. Food of this description is unsuited to the labourer. It will not maintain strength, nor will it maintain health, and, if long persevered in, it will be followed by some one or other of the prevailing diseases which result immediately ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... were no sparklings there. I turned it back again—and there they were. And what were they like? Realization came to me—they were like the little, dancing, radiant atoms that had played for a time about the emptiness where had stood Sorgar of the Lower Waters before he had been shaken into the nothingness! And that green light ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... its arms to me as a returning prodigal, and my revulsion of feeling was all the more spontaneous from the fact, that, if some of my former acquaintances were as frivolous as ever, they had learned to conceal their emptiness by an adaptability which made them agreeable companions. There was a keen satisfaction, too, in the consciousness which became mine, as I went from house to house during the following weeks, that I excelled the most of them in the power to make myself agreeable. The reading and study of ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... dashed to pieces, it appears to me of late to be a maelstrom that engulfs everything in its resistless and terrible sweep. Fortune, health, peace, reputation, all are caught and swept away; but the worst is its heartlessness—and its emptiness." ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... spoke to him of the vanity and emptiness of human life, of the worthless baubles for which men exchange all they have, that is to say, their immortal gift of time, which soon passes away and is ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... wild, tearing shriek in the air beside me and something rushed past us with a noise like the passage of a flock of big birds. Both windows rattled as if they would break away from their sashes. Then a sense of emptiness and peace suddenly came over the room, and I knew ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... essential. The reality of a room, for instance, was to be found in the vacant space enclosed by the roof and the walls, not in the roof and walls themselves. The usefulness of a water pitcher dwelt in the emptiness where water might be put, not in the form of the pitcher or the material of which it was made. Vacuum is all potent because all containing. In vacuum alone motion becomes possible. One who could make of himself a vacuum ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... world in which neither parental nor filial love were more than the names of nonentities—Father, Son, Daughter, Child, but empty syllables, which philosophy heeded not—or rather loved them in their emptiness, but despised, hated, or feared them, when for a moment they seemed pregnant with a meaning from heaven, and each in ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... was odorous, like all dense thickets, but it was not dry. Water ran through there somewhere. Jean drew easier breath. All sounds except the rustling of birds or mice in the willows had ceased. The brake was pervaded by a dreamy emptiness. Jean decided to steal on a little farther, then wait till he felt he might safely ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... possessed her heart, she would stretch out her arms with a gesture of immense weariness the moment she was left alone. Solitude rendered her low spirited at once, for it brought her face to face with the emptiness and boredom within her. Extremely gay by nature and profession, she became dismal in solitude and would sum up her life in the following ejaculation, which recurred incessantly between ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... two antitheses of my text; and the other is no less profound and significant. 'He was rich; He became poor.' In this connection 'rich' can only mean possessed of the Divine fulness and independence; and 'poor' can only mean possessed of human infirmity, dependence, and emptiness. And so to Jesus of Nazareth, to be born was impoverishment. If there is nothing more in His birth than in the birth of each of us, the words are grotesquely inappropriate to the facts of the case. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... anew. Her desolation came upon her in an overwhelming wave. She turned with a great cry, and threw her arms wide to the risen sun, tottering blindly towards the emptiness that stretched beneath her feet. And as she went, she heard the roar of the torrent dashing down over its grim boulders to the great river up which they two had glided in their dream of enchantment aeons ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... thoughts are bent on winning a few sous nightly at cards after a good dinner; pride saved her from the shabby love intrigues of the provinces. A woman so much above the level of those about her, forced to decide between the emptiness of the men whom she meets and the emptiness of her own life, can make but one choice; marriage and society became a cloister for Anais. She lived by poetry as the Carmelite lives by religion. All the famous foreign books published ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... very well from the test. To begin with, this symphony is excessively long—it lasts an hour and a half—though there is no apparent justification for its proportions. It aims at being colossal, and mainly achieves emptiness. The motifs are more than familiar. After a funeral march of commonplace character and boisterous movement, where Beethoven seems to be taking lessons from Mendelssohn, there comes a scherzo, or rather a Viennese waltz, where Chabrier gives old Bach a helping hand. The adagietto has a ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... had been cut short by the chairman, Henslow, who ruled that scientific discussion alone was in order, the Bishop rose in response to calls from the audience, and "spoke for full half-an-hour with inimitable spirit, emptiness, ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... thousand of his letters—a mode of composition in which Libanius was thought to excel—are still extant, and already published. The critics may praise their subtle and elegant brevity; yet Dr. Bentley (Dissertation upon Phalaris, p. 48) might justly, though quaintly observe, that "you feel, by the emptiness and deadness of them, that you converse with some dreaming pedant, with his elbow on ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... penalty of the unpopularity of the first person singular in modern society falls upon the individual. The hard part of it, for a man who has not the daily habit of being a companion to himself, is his own personal private sense of emptiness—of missing things. All the universe gets itself addressed to some one else—a great showy heartless pantomime it rolls over him, beckoning with its nights and days and winds and faces—always beckoning, but to some one else. All that seems to be left to him in a universe is ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... happiness,' Paul asked, 'to pay for a week's emptiness and longing with one minute of delirium? Is it a happy thing to be so set on one unattainable hope as to be able, dreaming or waking, to think of nothing else? A man is not to be made happy ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... was at hand, and before that day was over she was to experience that awful emptiness and desolation which those know ...
— A World of Girls - The Story of a School • L. T. Meade
... grace on normal days even to Commercial Street, or to the network of lanes north of the Bethnal Green Road. The pitiless wind swept the streets—swept the children and the grown-ups out of them into the houses, or any available shelter; and in the dark and chilly emptiness of the side roads one might listen in fancy for the stealthy returning steps of spirits crueller than Cold, more tyrannous than Poverty, coming to seize ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... they are singing with emptiness. Our souls are light; they have shaken a burden of hours . . . What did we build it for? Was it all a dream? . . . Ghostly above us in lamplight the towers gleam . . . And after a while they will fall to dust and rain; Or else we will tear them ...
— The House of Dust - A Symphony • Conrad Aiken
... my eyes on the ominous trail; its very emptiness fascinated me, and I dismounted and knelt to examine it where, near a dry, rotten log, some ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers
... all the quiet emptiness of Norton Pit. The children heard the sheep-bells and Young jim's busy bark above them, and they scrambled up ...
— Rewards and Fairies • Rudyard Kipling
... remarked that the stage has arisen from an irresistible longing for the new and extraordinary. Man, oppressed by divided cares, and satiated with sensual pleasure, felt an emptiness or want. Man, neither altogether satisfied with the senses, nor forever capable of thought, wanted a middle state, a bridge between the two states, bringing them into harmony. Beauty and aesthetics supplied that ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... prosperity. She saw without compassion the graying hair, the tired eyes of anxiety, the lines of brooding and despondency deepening in faces she remembered as carefree and hopeful, the look of resignation that comes to the weaklings who have lost their grip, the emptiness of burned-out passion, the weary languor of repeated failure—she saw it all through the eyes of her ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... and went in amongst the budding currant-bushes, the neat gravel-paths and strawberry-beds, that had been erst so cherished by the naval commander. Mr. Carter peered in at the back windows of the house, and through the little casement he saw a vista of emptiness. He listened, but there was no sound of voices or footsteps. The blinds were undrawn, and he could see the bare walls of the rooms, the fireless grates, and that cold bleakness of aspect peculiar to an ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... Professor Max Muller, and can be found in volume xlix. of the Sacred Books of the East ("Buddhist Mahayana Sutras").—Apropos of the magical use of the text, as described in this story, it is worth remarking that the subject of the sutra is the Doctrine of the Emptiness of Forms,—that is to say, of the unreal character of all phenomena or noumena... "Form is emptiness; and emptiness is form. Emptiness is not different from form; form is not different from emptiness. What is form—that is emptiness. What is emptiness—that is form... ...
— Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things • Lafcadio Hearn
... like little pieces of furniture wherein things are secreted, full of drawers fitted into each other; one hurts himself, breaks his nails in opening them, and then finds within only some withered flower, a few grains of dust—or emptiness! And then perhaps he felt afraid of learning too ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... the eyes of all familiar with the common sordidness of its everyday dress, a picture of artistic loveliness. And after the master's little speech of thanks for their good work that afternoon, and for all their goodness to him, the boys and girls went their ways with that strangely unnameable heart-emptiness that brings an ache to the throat, but somehow makes happier ...
— Glengarry Schooldays • Ralph Connor |
