"Meaningless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to-day. How blind and selfish some people are! I do believe that Aunt Rachel is content to live on this dreadful place. She is infatuated with Edmond. 'I am anchored securely in a home: she says. 'The house under the sea is a young man's romantic fancy.' The rest is meaningless to her—a man's whim. 'I cannot dissipate my fortune on Ken's Island.' Aunt Rachel was always ...
— The House Under the Sea - A Romance • Sir Max Pemberton
... of the thirteenth century,—presents the strongest contrast to all that had gone before. The morose and lifeless monotony or barbarous rudeness of these figures seems like contempt not only of beauty, but of all natural expression. They are meaningless of themselves, and quite indifferent to the character they represent, which is appended to them by inscriptions,—their relative importance, even, indicated only by size, more or less splendor of costume, etc., but the faces ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... emotion that throbbed along his veins, upon the palm that hung listless by her side, and gazed into her eyes. Still she neither spoke nor shrank, and, in the imperfect light, her face looked very pale, while her lovely eyes were dark and meaningless ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... down for them. Naturally he was compelled to write cadenzas for them as elaborate and effective as those which they had been in the habit of improvising, so that much of his Italian music sounds empty and meaningless to our ears. But he introduced the thin edge of the wedge, and although even to the days of Jenny Lind singers were occasionally permitted to interpolate cadenzas of their own, the old tradition that an opera was merely an opportunity ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... the little cabin where the sledge dogs stood harnessed. Hatless, silent, crowding back their grief behind grim and lonely countenances, they waited for Cummins' wife to say good-bye. The woman did not speak. She held up her child for each man to kiss, and the baby babbled meaningless things into the bearded faces that it had come to know and love, and when it came to Williams' turn he whispered, "Be a good baby, be a good baby." And when it was all over the woman crushed the child to her breast and dropped sobbing upon the sledge, and Jan cracked his whip and shouted hoarsely ...
— Back to God's Country and Other Stories • James Oliver Curwood
... The theory that there were originally two parallel outer walls, that Darius razed one and Herodotus saw the other (Baumstark in Pauly-Wissowa, Real-Encycl. ii. 2696), is meaningless. There could be no use in razing one and leaving the other, which was almost as strong (Hdt. i. 181). It is, however, not quite certain that Herodotus (i. 181) meant that there were ...
— Ancient Town-Planning • F. Haverfield
... up to her flat and had a little cry. It was a meaningless cry, the kind of cry that only a woman knows about, a cry from no particular cause, altogether an absurd cry; the most transient and the most hopeless cry in the repertory of grief. Why had Martin never thrashed her? ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... flocking presences of the dead, the shock of imaginations that had no words, of quixotic emotions which the stranger had stirred in that low, mocking, furtive talk beside the broken stones of the Huguenot. Was the 'change' quite so monstrous, so meaningless? How often, indeed, he remembered curiously had he seemed to be standing outside these fast-shut gates of thought, that now had been freely ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... far from finding life unintelligible, it would be nearer the truth to say that man's reason can, strictly speaking, understand nothing else.[22] 'Instinct finds,' says Bergson, 'but does not search. Reason searches but cannot find.'[23] 'But,' adds Professor Dewey, 'what we find is meaningless save as measured by searching, and so instincts and passions must be elevated into reason.'[24] In the lower creatures instinct does the {65} work of reason—sufficiently for the simple conditions in which the animal lives. And in the earlier ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... cross-reference between sections or chapters for the (now meaningless) cross-references between pages. Also, like many books of that day, the original had many page headings such as "MYTHICAL ETYMOLOGIES" or "HILL AND DALE", without incorporating them in the table of contents or the text, or even making it clear just where those page headings fitted into ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... moment. . . . But it isn't quite as easy as all that, my dear fellow. In times of unrest power comes automatically more and more into the hands of the man who can talk; men like Ramage, and others of his kidney. A few meaningless but high flown phrases; a few such parrot cries as 'Down with the Capitalist and the Future is for the Worker,' and you've got even the steadiest man unsettled. . . . Especially if he's one of a crowd; mob psychology is the devil. . . ." Sir James paused and stared out of the window. "I don't ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... and classes. Among them were perhaps one thousand, perhaps two thousand, copies of the newspaper. Some ten thousand people were craning necks and straining eyes to read those papers. The rest were making short, hoarse, frequently meaningless ejaculations. ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... human sympathies. Back River, Bush River, Gunpowder Creek,—lives there the man with soul so dead that his memory has cerements to wrap up these senseless names in the same envelopes with their meaningless localities? But the Susquehanna,—the broad, the beautiful, the historical, the poetical Susquehanna,—the river of Wyoming and of Gertrude, dividing the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... senseless day, after its happy but meaningless triviality, the throng and mixed perfumery and silly courteous gestures, his blessed solitude! Oh solitude, that noble peace of the mind! He loved the throng and multitude of the day: he loved people: but sometimes ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... revealed the window of the garden-room driven bodily inward, shutters and all, and now forming an inclined bridge over Dougal's ineffectual tubs. In front of it stood McGuffog, swinging his gun by the barrel and yelling curses, which, being mainly couched in the vernacular, were happily meaningless to Saskia. She herself stood at the hall door, plucking at something hidden in her breast. He saw that it was a ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... great open space of Smithfield, in London, on one side of which stood the venerable Abbey of Saint Bartholomew, now occupied by the hospital of that name. The men who composed it were rough and wild, and, for the most part, shouted and clutched their clubs and bows in a meaningless sort of way, which plainly showed that they were not very clear in their own minds as to the object of their assembling together, but that they came and shouted and threatened because their leaders ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... as an adjective or with an adjective sense. "Quality clothes" is meaningless: "Clothes of quality" equally so. All clothes have quality and the expression has meaning only when the quality is defined as good, bad, high, ...
— Word Study and English Grammar - A Primer of Information about Words, Their Relations and Their Uses • Frederick W. Hamilton
... never accepted purely social invitations from white persons. He always claimed that he could best satisfy his social desires among his own people. He believed that the question of so-called "social equality" between the races was too academic and meaningless to be worthy of ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... would come with his army at his back, it was an absurd proposal. If it meant that he would come alone, it was a falsehood. In either case it was a device to fritter away time. [Sidenote: Sulla's astuteness and superstition.] For all the while that he was bandying meaningless messages he continued his onward march. He had sacrificed, and the soothsayer Postumius, when he saw the entrails, had stretched out his hands to him, and offered to be kept in chains for punishment after the battle if it was not a victory. ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... particularly in the home, as infra dignitatem and hence intolerable. Out of' that notion arise many lamentable phenomena. On the one hand, we have the spectacle of a great number of healthy and well-fed women engage in public activities that, nine times out of ten, are meaningless, mischievous and a nuisance, and on the other hand we behold such a decay in the domestic arts that, at the first onslaught of the late war, the national government had to import a foreign expert ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... exceptions, did not impress me more favorably here than at the Champs-Elysees. They have a used-up look; their features are meaningless, or rather they have all the same meaning. The proud, stalwart bearing which we find in the portraits of our ancestors—men who joined moral to physical vigor—has disappeared. Yet in this gathering there was one ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... tinker's tools, and seen the lives of the poor, and the woe of them, and the wretchedness of it all, and the utter uselessness of everything, and the horrible, intolerable, unending pain of all the things that breathe, one comes to think that in this meaningless mystery which men call life a little laughter and a little love are the only things which save us all from madness—the madness that would curse ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... the solitary performer. And the poor actress was growing old, wasting her smiles, and her poses, and her bursts of laughter, and her sudden entries on the empty air, till by mechanical repetition they had grown so meaningless as to be almost ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... Havelock Ellis' "Psychology of Sex" are fully at your disposal. But the more this species of truth is given out, the more life itself, for which you educate the child, will appear to him unworthy and meaningless. If the truth of civilized life is merely that which natural science can analyze, then life has lost its honour and its loyalty, its enthusiasm and its value. He who sees the truth in the idealistic aspect of man will not necessarily evade the curious ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... when I had leisure to observe outside matters, I perceived that among the other actors in the drama confusion still reigned. There was much scuttering about and much meaningless shouting. Mr Abney's reedy tenor voice was issuing directions, each of which reached a dizzier height of futility than the last. Glossop was repeating over and over again the words, 'Shall I telephone for the police?' to which nobody ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... we have already finished. Some review there must be, for certain things are specially hard to keep in mind, and have to be gone over and over, lest they fade into forgetfulness. But there must be continued progress in a life school. There is no parrot repetition, sing-song, meaningless, of words that have ceased to be vital. New lessons are to be learned as fast as the old ones are understood. Of what use to set Polly tasks to develop her bravery, when ...
— Polly Oliver's Problem • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... Sent him away with the notes of a melody floating through his brain, so that the merry laugh of his children will be a discord, and such a memory of a soft glance, that his wife's bright look will be meaningless.' ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... in the tradition of 'the three kings of Cologne,' and in the Arabian story of the 'Three Calenders.' The line quoted by Thomson, (Shakspeare, by Thomson, Vol. X. p. 701.) 'Under which King Bezonian, speak or die!' (though we agree with him in preferring his pointing to the ordinary and meaningless 'Under which King, Bezonian,' etc.) unhappily can throw no light on the present passage till we know how many King Bezonians are intended, and who they were. Perhaps we should read Belzonian, and suppose a reference to the Egyptian monarchs ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... Demming? Why don't you realize, that I'm the only man in existence who has no need for money, who can't spend money? That my fellow men—whom I've done such a good job of betraying—have honored me to a point where money is meaningless?" ...
— Medal of Honor • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... a demonstration of method, is not altogether meaningless, even without the text beside it, shows the accuracy and nicety of his criticism. And Avril contains a number of similar observations which are valuable in the extreme as aids to judgement and ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... greater part of the morning with the new heiress, and Lydia had listened, speechless, as he recited a long and meaningless list of securities, of estates, of ground rents, balances and the like, which she ...
— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace
... realizes how much other variations of position influence the psychological effect. Starch[51] made experiments in which he did not use real advertisements, but meaningless syllables so as to exclude the influence of familiarity with any announcement. He arranged little booklets, each of 12 pages, on which a syllable such as lod, zan, mep, dut, yib, and so on was printed in the middle of each page. Each of his 50 subjects glanced over the book and then ...
— Psychology and Industrial Efficiency • Hugo Muensterberg
... a man who handles tools, hung down by his new black trousers. Ev'leen Ann's strong fingers stood out stiffly from one another. They looked hard at the minister and repeated after him in low and meaningless tones the solemn and touching words of the marriage service. Back of them stood the wedding company, in freshly washed and ironed white dresses, new straw hats, and black suits smelling of camphor. In the background, among the other elders, ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... avenue. Dorn felt a return of interest in himself. Introspection bored him. His insincerity made self thought meaningless. Listeners, however, revived him. As they walked he caught occasional glimpses of his companion—vivid eyes, dark lips, a cool, shadow-tinted face that belonged under exotic trees; a morose little girl insanely sensitive and with a dream inside ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... with figures and writing relating to this work. These papers justified the subsequent verdict of the Coroner's jury that Hunter committed suicide in a fit of temporary insanity, for they were covered with a lot of meaningless scribbling, the words wrongly spelt and having no intelligible connection with each other. There was one sum that he had evidently tried repeatedly to do correctly, but which came wrong in a different way every time. The fact that he had the razor in his possession seemed to point ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... ill-fitting halos and imitation wings, singing meaningless hymns which Priscilla ...
— A Parody Outline of History • Donald Ogden Stewart
... earnest those meaningless French ejaculations, whispered something about Him who alone can comfort ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... good-humouredly. "There, I think that will do now, with a strip or two of plaster which I have here," producing some diachylon from a pocket-book. "How do you feel now?" he added, addressing himself to the boy, who had kept his eyes fixed on his face in the same meaningless stare as when he had first ...
— Picked up at Sea - The Gold Miners of Minturne Creek • J.C. Hutcheson
... Mr. Stackpole bade him a cheerful good day. At the sound of the words the Swiss spun on his heel, then gulped audibly and backed away, flinching almost as though a blow had been aimed at him. He muttered some meaningless something, confusedly: he stared at Mr. Stackpole with widened eyes like one who beholds an apparition in the broad of the day; he stepped on his own feet and got in his own way as he shrank to the outer edge of the narrow pavement. ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... through his mind as he watched him across the cigar smoke. The rattling of that donkey-engine, the shouts of the lightermen, the thuds of the sulfur-sacks—how ridiculous they all sounded, the clatter of a futile, meaningless existence where men gathered—rubbish, for mere bodies that lived amid dust a few years, then returned to ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... the least guess its significance, though we imagined that it must be preliminary to some sacrifice or offering. It was like the fragment of a nightmare preserved by the awakened senses in all its mad, meaningless reality. ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... to him of his broker. On the other hand, provisions purporting to entitle the broker in disregard of his duties as broker himself to act as principal, would be rejected by the courts as radically inconsistent with the primary object of the contract of brokerage and, therefore, meaningless. But it is undoubtedly too often the practice of brokers who are members of exchanges to consider themselves entitled to act as principals and sell on their own account to their own clients, particularly in futures. The causes of this opinion, erroneously, though quite ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... look strange to us,—when the darling of our hearts is ruthlessly torn away, and we sit in the darkness of the tomb,—when shame for the living lost bows us to the earth in anguish,—when life has become meaningless, and nothing remains to vitalize the monotony of existence,—when we look upon our own past hopes, ambitions, interests, as though they characterized some other being, long since departed,—when the morning light and the evening shade, May's sweet flowers and November's yellow leaves, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... violence. More than once the young man and Mademoiselle de Fontaine walked, tete-a-tete, in the avenues of the garden, where nature was dressed like a woman going to a ball. More than once they had those conversations, aimless and meaningless, in which the emptiest phrases are those which cover the deepest feelings. They often admired together the setting sun and its gorgeous coloring. They gathered daisies to pull the petals off, and sang the most impassioned ...
— The Ball at Sceaux • Honore de Balzac
... had clearly become a caballero since those early days of adventure. Hillyard noted the point for his own guidance, thanking his stars meanwhile that the gift of the house was a meaningless politeness. ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... last, and there was a general movement. She went with the crowd, Mercer's last words still running through her brain with a reiteration that made them almost meaningless. On the other side of the Customs house! Of course, of course she would find ...
— Rosa Mundi and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... he put it?" asked Willie, abstractedly, as he tried to read some meaning into the grocer's apparently meaningless acts. ...
— The Secret Wireless - or, The Spy Hunt of the Camp Brady Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss
... even as this Francesca of Mr. Marion Crawford? I think so; she has taken bad plays as willingly as good plays, to turn them to her own purpose, and she has been as triumphant, if not as fine, in bad plays as in good ones. Now her Francesca is lifeless, a melodious image, making meaningless music. She says over the words, cooingly, chantingly, or frantically, as the expression marks, to which she seems to act, demand. The interest is ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... "is that any reason, Bertrand, why you should pause to listen to the voices whose cry is meaningless? Think! Remember the blind folly of it all. A decade, a cycle of years, and the men who pass you in Pall Mall, and the women who smile at you from their carriages, will be dead and gone. You—you may become the Emperor of ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... are now the masters of the continent. England is thus made a nullity; the "celsa sedet in Eolus in arce," which Canning delighted to quote, to express the moderating function which he wished to reserve for his country, is now a meaningless phrase. Let not your preachers of the theory of material interests, your speculators upon extended markets deceive themselves; there is history to teach them that political influence and commercial influence ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... the candidacy and platform of Bell were meaningless, those of both Lincoln and Breckinridge, Sectional, and that he alone bore aloft the standard of the entire Union; while, on the other hand, the supporters of Lincoln, his chief antagonist, claimed that—as the burden of the song from the lips of ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... felt the exuberance of being in touch with affairs of import. Hitherto the mill had been merely a greedy monster claiming her freedom and draining her energies in tasks routine, such as the copying of meaningless documents and rows of figures; now, supplied with stimulus and a motive, the Corporation began to take on significance, and she flung herself into the work with an ardour hitherto unknown, determined to make herself so valuable to Ditmar that the time would come when he could not do without her. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... all his offices. For nearly three centuries after the one-man power had become absolute, Rome continued to call itself a republic, to go through forms of election and ceremonial, which grew ever more and more meaningless ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... the taboo enforced by a Morals Police is, perhaps, as good a way as any of gaining a fictitious sense of activity. But the ideal of "annihilation" becomes an irrelevant and meaningless phrase. If lust is deeply rooted in men and its only expression is evil, I for one should recommend a faith in the millennium. You can put this Paradise at the beginning of the world or the end of it. Practical ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... What makes such work sound unreal is not the praise of Ibsen, but the praise of the novelty of Ibsen. Any advantage that Bernard Shaw had over Colonel Craven I have over Bernard Shaw; we who happen to be born last have the meaningless and paltry triumph in that meaningless and paltry war. We are the superiors by that silliest and most snobbish of all superiorities, the mere aristocracy of time. All works must become thus old and insipid which have ever tried to be "modern," which have ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... a book," and I tried to explain what the idea was, and read out a few lines; it happened to be Pickwick. They were absorbed. Slim said, half to himself, "Something like a glass," which I thought quite meaningless at the time. Then I showed them a picture in another book. That ...
— The Five Jars • Montague Rhodes James
... to comfort her tears with promises, unsubstantial nutriment indeed, and they could not satisfy the child, who failed dismally to understand them. Through the green blinds came the noise of life and health and merriment; curses too, sometimes, but only the curses of the well fed, and therefore meaningless. Already the sun fell hot and indomitable on the room, and the atmosphere at their touch became stifling. Gregorio, swallowing his tears, tore out into the street, shouting up the narrow stairway hysterical words ...
— Stories by English Authors: Africa • Various
... always secretive and conservative in his dealings. Only to Mr. Mallowe, Mr. Rockamore and Mr. Carlis did he ever divulge his plans to the slightest extent. A bankrupt! My father a bankrupt? The very words seem meaningless to me. Dr. Franklin, there must be some ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... incredibility pounded at him again, making the blood sing in his ears. Nothing heard at school or from the Parson—who had long perturbed himself as to the right moment for explanations—had started those first warning notes, but words freely bandied across his head at home as a little boy, and then meaningless to him—words that had since echoed back on to fuller knowledge ominously. If it had not been that Archelaus, the free-speaker and the vindictive One of the family, was still in Australia, and that Ishmael spent a large part of his holidays with friends of the Parson's in Devon and Somerset, the ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... aware that Pao-yue was gifted with such a peculiar temperament, that he even looked upon flattering or auspicious phrases with utter aversion, treating them as meaningless and consequently insincere, so when, after listening to those truths, she had spoken with such pathos, he, lapsed into another of his melancholy moods, she blamed herself for the want of consideration she had betrayed. ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... admit "all comers" to the Altar. To give way on such a point would be to forfeit, and rightly to forfeit, the respect of any law-abiding people, and would be—in many cases, is—"a great discredit, and a serious peril" to the Church. We have few enough rules as it is, and if those that we have are meaningless, we may well be held up to derision. The Prayer Book makes no provision whatever for those who are not Confirmed, and who, if able to receive Confirmation, are neither "ready nor ...
— The Church: Her Books and Her Sacraments • E. E. Holmes
... could have seen aught. Perhaps had one been there to point them out to us, we might have noted indentations in the mud, but there were countless indentations, one overlapping another into a confusion that would have been entirely meaningless to us. To Tarzan each told its own story. Tantor, the elephant, had passed that way as recently as three suns since. Numa had hunted here the night just gone, and Horta, the boar, had walked slowly along the trail within an hour; but what held Tarzan's attention was the ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... together with instructions to multiply, subtract, extract roots, et cetera, which are similarly chosen at random and not known to anyone. Once in twenty times or so, Schweeringen predicts the result of this meaningless computation before the computer has made it. This is incredible! The odds are trillions to one against it! Since nobody knows the sums or instructions given to the computer, it cannot be mind-reading in any form. It must be pure precognition. ...
— The Leader • William Fitzgerald Jenkins (AKA Murray Leinster)
... a common and almost meaningless remark, that one has to be careful to avoid being lost in New York, but the words "Lost in New York" have a deeper meaning than the thoughtless speakers imagine. If the curious would know the full force of these words, let them ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... Voodoo and Obeah forms of magic. Some writers have spoken of it under the name "elementary," but as that title has at one time or other been used for almost every variety of post-mortem entity, it has become so vague and meaningless that it is perhaps better to ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater
... trumpets keep up their gobble. Groups of polite and frivolous persons pass and repass like fantastic shadows: childish bands of small-eyed mousmes with smile so candidly meaningless and coiffures shining through their bright silver flowers; ugly men waving at the end of long branches their eternal lanterns shaped like birds, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... parents! As we grow older, are we not taught who we are—taught call God our Father—taught about Jesus Christ, who He is, and what He is? Is that, too, nothing? Alas! that knowledge is generally a mere meaningless school-lesson, cared for neither by child nor by man. At confirmation, again, we solemnly declare that we belong to Christ's kingdom, and that we will live as His subjects, and His alone. And we are brought to His bishops, to be received as free, reasonable, Christian people, to claim ...
— Twenty-Five Village Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... pass him over, nor why there may not be something peculiarly valuable in the noble freedom and genuine modernism of his poetic spirit, to an age that is apparently only forsaking the clerical idyll of one school, for the reactionary mediaevalism or paganism, intrinsically meaningless and issueless, ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 3: Byron • John Morley
... The planets and satellites of Sol had proven comparatively tractable and those that were suited to man-life were quickly brought under his dominion. But there, of course, he had the advantage of proximity. The time involved in running back and forth to the home planet was meaningless and all Earth's resources could be thrown into ...
— Adaptation • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... details of tea manufacture, of the repeated, meaningless, tossing back and forth and Chinese juggling with the abused tea leaves, are but too familiar to students of the subject: and too disappointing also, when we are moved to ask—Why all this manipulation? What is the nature of the chemical changes ...
— Tea Leaves • Francis Leggett & Co.
... person, or small group of persons of ordinary intelligence, can train themselves to be equal to this. A very simple instance occurred in the earliest experiences of the writer. After three or four sittings round a small table with two friends, at which there was meaningless tipping, and nothing better than commonplace sentences, the following was tipped out: "Try no more to move"—then this succession of letters—"a t a t a." It seemed useless to go on with nonsense, but one of the party suggested perseverance; when the following conclusion ...
— Psychic Phenomena - A Brief Account of the Physical Manifestations Observed - in Psychical Research • Edward T. Bennett
... us into the minds and souls of one another, there to deposit a judgment or a sympathy, or whatever our nature suggests at sight of our neighbor's failings. In obeying such an impulse one can easily peer through the conventional veil which screens such phases of human character under the meaningless appellations of "Blues," or "Indisposition." They are truly the visible effect of a secret hidden cause, which is sometimes brought to the surface by the magnetic power of one who has studied human ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... power is not distinguished. In any case, however, that graphic power must have been subordinate to their effect as pink spots, while the band of green-blue round the plate's edge, and the spots of gold, pretend to no graphic power at all, but are meaningless spaces of color or metal. Still less have they any mechanical office: they add nowise to the serviceableness of the plate; and their agreeableness, if they possess any, depends, therefore, neither on any imitative, nor any structural, character; ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... racial solidarity. The French, more fluid and sensitive to the incongruous, have introduced local colour into some of their Colonial buildings, not without success. As to this particular Roman tradition, it pursues one with meaningless iteration from the burning sands of Africa to Ultima Thule. Always those four ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... linking them together as far as they would fit, and quite ignorant that presently the remaining half would suddenly be given him, and with almost no trouble would at once fit into the gaps he had necessarily left, and transform a meaningless pattern into a perfect and intelligible whole. Let us consider some of these map pieces. The ultimate picture was the conception of the whole world of life, past and present, as a single family tree growing up from the simplest possible roots, and gradually ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... as she moved about her stateroom setting in order the books, magazines, flowers, and candy, with which Banneker had sought to fortify her against the tedium of the trip. As the time for departure drew near, they fell into and effortfully maintained that meaningless, banal, and jerky talk which is the inevitable concomitant of long partings between people who, really caring for each other, can find nothing but commonplaces wherewith to ease their stress of mind. Miss Van Arsdale's common sense came ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... and awkward, laughed hysterically, flung out a few meaningless phrases. Margaret murmured: "Perhaps you'd rather go?" She wished him to go, now that she had ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... music, ranged around the walls. One girl at the organ is graceful; another with a tambourine has a sort of Bassarid beauty. But the group of Apollo, Pegasus, and a Muse upon Parnassus, is a failure in its meaningless frigidity, while few of these subordinate compositions show power of ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... also puts printed or written papers in a machine which is run like a clock. Well, this is an easy way to say prayers. And are there not many prayers offered, not merely by Chinamen, that are machine prayers, soulless, heartless, meaningless, and faithless, and which bring no answer? But how simple, how beautiful, how sublime, the golden Prayer which the Divine Master taught His disciples! Lord, teach us how to pray. If the noble Liturgy of the Church is properly rendered,—for it is the expansion of the Lord's ...
— By the Golden Gate • Joseph Carey
... with feelings of bitter hatred against his former friend; and it is probable that wounded pride worked upon him as violently as disappointed passion. He was heard by several persons to utter vows of vengeance—rarely meaningless in that uncivilised island—and few were surprised when next day the news spread that Giustiniani had disappeared. Public opinion at once pointed to Bartuccio as the murderer. He was arrested, and a ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 445 - Volume 18, New Series, July 10, 1852 • Various
... suffering, unconscious tortures, it is harder to speak—of the innocent, for so they are, victims of lust and brutality in Babylon here, whose sense of suffering is almost gone, and is succeeded by nothing but the desire for rest; all this seems so meaningless, ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... lost all its power over me. A stone has more feeling than I. I don't love to pray. I am sick and tired of this dreadful struggle after holiness; good books are all alike, flat and meaningless. But I must have something to absorb and carry me away, and I have come back to my music and my drawing with new zest. Mother was right in warning me against giving them up. Maria Kelley is teaching me to paint in oil-colors, and says I have ...
— Stepping Heavenward • Mrs. E. Prentiss
... good-natured, kindly dispositioned man, and in theory he was delighted to pay periodical visits to the wife and children of his dead brother William; in practice, he infinitely preferred the comfort and seclusion of his own house and garden, and the companionship of his books and his parrot to these rather meaningless and tiresome incursions into a family circle with which he had little in common. It was not so much the spur of his own conscience that drove him to make the occasional short journey by rail to visit his relatives, as an obedient concession to the more insistent but vicarious conscience ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... "voyages to the moon," but none of higher merit than the one just mentioned. That of Bergerac is utterly meaningless. In the third volume of the "American Quarterly Review" will be found quite an elaborate criticism upon a certain "journey" of the kind in question—a criticism in which it is difficult to say whether the critic most exposes the stupidity of the book, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... not answer. The clutch of forty-eight hours of wakeful activity was upon him. The words of Old Andy were only so much of a meaningless jumble to him. Into the car he stumbled, a doddering, red-eyed thing, to drink his coffee as the rest drank it, to shamble to the stove, forgetful of the steaming, rancid air, then like some tired beast, sink to the ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... but we don't now." She laughed a little bitterly. "Poor Nat! I am only another trial added to your long list. Your beliefs, your ideals are meaningless to me—mere narrow-minded dogmas, stifling thought. Nellie was the wife Nature had intended for you, so soon as she had lost her beauty and with it all her worldly ideas. Fate was maturing her for you, if only we had known. As for me, I ought to have been the wife ...
— The Philosopher's Joke • Jerome K. Jerome
... the other's cold dry hand for an instant. The men who had overheard the short conversation looked upon it as a meaningless incident, the memory of which would disappear from the lieutenant's brain ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... initiations are not only exceedingly impressive and beautiful, but really instructive. It may also be added that they are never tedious, which will be agreeable information to those who, in entering secret societies, have been dragged through long, meaningless rigmaroles, conscious of being made a spectacle of, and preserving their temper only by the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... "hell" is the creation of the false philosophy which makes the eternal duality resolve itself into flesh and spirit or into soul and body. The power of love renders this symbol meaningless and abortive; for personality is the supreme victory of life over what resists life; and consequently where personality exists "hell" cannot exist; for personality is the scope and boundary of all we know. The symbol of "Satan" also is rendered meaningless ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... sobs diminished; she began to murmur broken, meaningless ejaculations of self-contempt; and to strain away from Jenny. At last she pushed Jenny from her, feverishly freeing herself, so that they stood apart, while Emmy blew her nose and wiped her eyes. ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... but stopped at the first shelter, and seating himself in the corner best protected from the wind, he examined the book at leisure. Nearly every page was scored with a meaningless jungle of pencil marks: rows of capital letters, short words, long words, complete sentences, copy-book tags. The whole thing, in fact, had the appearance of a copy-book, and on a more careful scrutiny Eustace thought that there was ample evidence ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... of course, he could not afford it. She was always so indelicate and awkward! She added a few meaningless words to save him the humiliation of ...
— Shallow Soil • Knut Hamsun
... grandly, and used such great big words!—"A good thing, too," Mrs Asplin averred. She wished the rest would follow her example, and not use so much foolish, meaningless slang.—Her eyes looked so bright and mocking, as if she were laughing at something all the time.—Poor, dear child! could she not talk as she liked? It was a great blessing she could be bright, poor ...
— About Peggy Saville • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... said. But they faltered and hung back at every utterance of his spasmodically uttered "now! now!" He scanned their faces eagerly, with a hope that gradually yielded to despondency. Their features were blank and inexpressive, as their answers had been meaningless or evasive. Several of them were of that class of quiet citizens, unaccustomed to any enterprises but those of trade, who are always slow to peril wealth by a direct issue with their despotism. They felt the truth of Bolivar's assertions. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... danger. He did not reply to it; he did not appear to have heard it. His eyes traveled over me, as though they had been sightless, and challenged Paul's. In the excitement of the moment, his words sounded tame, and almost meaningless. ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... mistress-of-the-house till a call ended, to stop to try to think it out. Later on, tonight, after the children were in bed, when she was brushing her hair . . . oh, probably she'd find as you so often did, when you went after the cause of some unexpected little feeling, that it came from a meaningless fortuitous association of ideas, like Elly's hatred of grape-jelly because she had once taken some ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... emotion struggling within his heart must burst forth at last and pervade the visible world. He was conscious of an impulse to sing, to laugh, to talk in broken sentences to himself; and any utterance, however slight and meaningless, seemed to relieve in a measure the nervous ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... precaution, for, on running into the bathroom one morning when every one else was downstairs, the eldest boy, Ronald, saw, floating in the bath, the body of a hoary-headed old man. It was bloated and purplish blue, and had big, glassy eyes that stared at him in such a hideous, meaningless manner that he uttered a scream of terror and fled. Alarmed at the noise, most of the household ran to see what had happened. Only the Captain remained behind. He knew only too well, and he hid, letting his wife ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... to Miss Margaret's movements, though there was nothing whatever of the ghost about Miss Margaret herself. She was a plump, short person, no longer young, with coal-black hair growing low on the forehead, and a round face that would have been nearly meaningless if the features had not been emphasized—italicized, so to speak—by the small-pox. Moreover, the brilliancy of her toilet would have rendered any ghostly hypothesis untenable. Mrs. Solomon (we refer to the ...
— A Rivermouth Romance • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... for the territory of the Maharaja of Kashmir are meaningless. In the huge Indus valley the incidence is only 4 persons per sq. mile. In Jammu and Kashmir it is 138. The map taken from the Census Report gives the details. The increase in the decade was on paper 8-1/2 p.c., distributed between 5-1/4 in Jammu, 12 in Kashmir, and 14 in the ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... is the vocabulary without the key; it is the lamp without the flame. Let the respected reader look or think over some old love-letters that he (or she) has had and forgotten, and try them over again. How blank and meaningless they seem! What glamour of infatuation was it which made that nonsense beautiful? One wonders that such puling and trash could ever have made one happy. And yet there were dates when you kissed those silly letters with rapture—lived upon six ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... plan, and what are incidental, is often more than we can readily determine in matters open to observation. And in plans executed mediately or indirectly, and for ends comprehensive and far-reaching, many purposed steps must appear to us incidental or meaningless. But the higher the intelligence, the more fully will the incidents enter into the plan, and the more universal and interconnected may the ends be. Trite as the remark is, it would seem still needful to insist that the failure ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... in her radiance; and Elise sat by the meagre fire trying to take interest in a novel. Although she had found it easy to be confident and self-assertive when the other girl was there, the solitariness of the flat and the silence of the street undermined her courage. The dragging minutes, the meaningless pages. . . . She wished that even Marian were there in all ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... one's mind to an instrument of companionship through which many may be led from a sense of isolation to one of civic responsibility, even as another type of club provides recreational facilities for those who have had only meaningless excitements, or, as a third type, opens new and interesting vistas of life to those who ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... corset, displacing the organs of her body, unfitting her to be a mother, causing more than half the surgical operations in the hospitals. She will then discuss character more than fashion. She will be ashamed of her silly, giggling and meaningless conversation. God said, "a man shall not wear that which pertains to a woman neither shall a woman put on a mans garment for all that do such things are an abomination unto God" women will then see the vulgarity and immodesty and sin in dressing in male attire ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation
... intellectual lyrics that no one will listen to. And all the critics will groan and grunt about "Dear old Pinafore." And I shall go on shining as a brilliantly meaningless ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... make it clear that it is not the reporters but the owners of the papers that should be censured. With the exception of a few garrulous and gushing geese, who think it smart to ask pert and meaningless questions, the male reporters that I have met have not only been serious and intelligent, but men with whom I have discussed literature, politics and religion; but it would not pay their editors, I presume, to publish conversations of this character. ...
— My Impresssions of America • Margot Asquith
... growth are, as a rule, useless. Being only the by-products of adaptive changes going on elsewhere, in any given case the chances are against these correlated effects being themselves of any utilitarian significance; and, therefore, as a matter of fact, correlated growths appear to be usually meaningless from the point of view of adaptation. Still, on the doctrine of chances, it is to be expected that sometimes a change of structure which has thus been indirectly produced by correlation of growth might happen to prove useful for some purpose or another; ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... seemed white and slender angels who would save me; but then, all at once, there came a most deadly nausea over my spirit, and I felt every fibre in my frame thrill as if I had touched the wire of a galvanic battery, while the angel forms became meaningless spectres, with heads of flame, and I saw that from them there would be no help. And then there stole into my fancy, like a rich musical note, the thought of what sweet rest there must be in the grave. The thought came gently and stealthily, and it seemed long before it attained full ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... must become Brahma. We must not shrink to avow this. Our existence is meaningless if we never can expect to realise the highest perfection that there is. If we have an aim and yet can never reach it, then it is no aim ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore
... surveyed the two men and boy, if not with indifference, at least with apathy. Just above his head swung the sign with its legend, "Slosson—Entertainment"; but if he were Slosson, one could take the last half of the sign either as a poetic rhapsody on the part of the painter, or the yielding to some meaningless convention, for in his person, Mr. Slosson suggested none of those qualities of brain or heart that trenched upon the lighter amenities of life. He was black-haired and bull-necked, and there was about him a certain shagginess which a recent toilet performed at the horse trough had ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... Herrick with a toothless smile that was shocking in its savagery; and his ear caught apparently by the trivial expression he had used, broke into a piece of the chorus of a comic song which he must have heard twenty years before in London: meaningless gibberish that, in that hour and place, seemed hateful as a blasphemy: 'Hikey, pikey, crikey, fikey, ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... commemorates our political freedom—a freedom which without economic freedom is meaningless indeed. Labor Day symbolizes our determination to achieve an economic freedom for the average man which will give his political ...
— The Fireside Chats of Franklin Delano Roosevelt • Franklin Delano Roosevelt
... and happy moment the massive gold candelabra—ancient things of a more luxurious age—and their opalescent shades. Against his advice the service, too, was of gold,—"rank vulgarity," he called it, with its rich meaningless ornamentation. But here Monty was obdurate. He insisted that he liked the color and that porcelain had no character. Mrs. Dan only prevented a quarrel by suggesting that several courses should be served ...
— Brewster's Millions • George Barr McCutcheon
... Volk's three charming pictures deserve to be better hung. The Stetson group illustrates the Impressionist method and result as well as anything in the Palace. Take his "Smugglers" or his "Summer Joy" (3311, 3317), and note how a few heavy and apparently meaningless dabs of color may be laid side by side on canvas in such a way that, when seen from a distance, they blend, until the picture not only outlines figures and foliage, but also glows with ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... inquisitive genius of the Renaissance opened for investigation. In the former of these regions we find two agencies at work—art and scholarship. During the Middle Ages the plastic arts, like philosophy, had degenerated into barren and meaningless scholasticism—a frigid reproduction of lifeless forms copied technically and without inspiration from debased patterns. Pictures became symbolically connected with the religious feelings of the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... you were by the very trifling margin of superiority that a hand known as a club flush bears over another hand consisting of three of the eights—not quite all of them, you understand, only three, and two other quite meaningless cards." ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... within, altogether drowning his summons for admission. He listened, perplexed. Light and rapid footsteps, the swishing of a silken skirt, a clear, musical laugh and cry of triumph, a succession of sounds which were wholly meaningless to him. Surely it was some sort of pandemonium. A momentary silence was followed by a chorus of voices. Reist raised his stick and knocked more loudly. A man's voice travelled out to him like ...
— The Traitors • E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim
... tired expecting by this time," returned Mollie practically. "Now will you please repeat that somewhat meaningless jumble of words, Betty dear? What was it—something about somebody's son having ...
— The Outdoor Girls at the Hostess House • Laura Lee Hope
... (1) That our current statecraft—its fundamental conceptions, its "axioms," its terminology—has become obsolete by virtue of the changed conditions of European society; that the causes of conflict which it creates are half the time based on illusions, upon meaningless and empty formulas; (2) that its survival is at bottom due to popular ignorance and indifference—the survival on the part of the great mass of just those conceptions born of the old and now obsolete conditions—since diplomacy, like all functions of government, is a reflection of ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... user and to the person addressed, of the signification of its terms. Its effectiveness is determined by the way in which it is employed, involving the choice of terms, as the true line for the false or meaningless one, the right value or note of color out of many that would almost do, the exact and specific word rather than the vague and feeble; involving also the combination of terms into articulate forms. These ways and methods ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... collections for some great purpose of study? Piece by piece the fragmentary spoils flow in upon him, of all sizes, shapes, and hues; a chaos of confused riches, perhaps only a wealth of rubbish, as they lie at his feet. One by one they fall into harmonious relations, until the meaningless heap has become a vast mosaic, where nothing is too minute to fill some interstice, nothing too angular to fit some corner, nothing so dull or brilliant of tint that it will not furnish its fraction of light or shadow. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... to the ritual act or the words used to designate it. Neither the ethnologist nor the priestly apologist will, as a rule, admit that he does not know why such ritual acts as pouring out water or burning incense are performed, and that they are wholly inexplicable and meaningless to him. Nor will they confess that the real inspiration to perform such rites is the fact of their predecessors having handed them down as sacred acts of devotion, the meaning of which has been entirely forgotten during the process of transmission from antiquity. Instead of this ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... it," said Levin without thinking, and he was conscious immediately that he had said what he did not think. He felt that if he admitted that, it would be proved that he had been talking meaningless rubbish. How it would be proved he could not tell, but he knew that this would inevitably be logically proved to him, and ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... another example of this rather fundamental tendency of the stupor reaction, not merely to diminish conative reactions in general, but to reduce their appearance to that of isolated, partial and therefore rather meaningless expression. ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... and which had become nearly a necessity of his existence. He could not live with an eternal critic; the prospect was totally inconceivable. He wanted love, and he wanted admiring love, and without it marriage was meaningless to him, a ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... Representatives or Palata Pretsaviteley (110 seats; members elected by universal adult suffrage to serve 4-year terms) election results: party affiliation data unavailable; under present political conditions party designations are meaningless elections: last held October 2000 (next to be held ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... the people, and the dark frowns of the baffled and exhausted Baal priests, as they gradually came out of their frenzy, and knew that they had lost their opportunity. The tranquil though earnest prayer of the prophet is in sharpest contrast with the meaningless bellowings to Baal. Note in it the solemn invocation. The great Name, which all listening to him had deposed from rule over them, is set in the front; and the ancestral worship, as well as the divine gifts and dealings with the patriarchs, is pleaded with God ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... a silly word. In a natural world there is no place for the supernatural.' He grew testy. 'Can I ever teach you, Helen, not to employ words utterly meaningless?' ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... apprehend where I had judged wrongly. My mistake was that I had applied an answer to my question concerning life which only concerned my own life, to life in general. My life had been but one long indulgence of my passions. It was evil and meaningless. Therefore such an answer had no application to life at large, but only to ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... all by which it speaks to us more clearly than to brutes, upon all which bears witness to the intentions of the Supreme that we are to receive more from the covering vault than the light and the dew which we share with the weed and the worm, as only a succession of meaningless and monotonous accident, too common and too vain to be worthy of a moment of watchfulness, or a glance of admiration. If in our moments of utter idleness and insipidity, we turn to the sky as a last resource, which of its phenomena do we speak of? One says, ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... dialogue, a confused multitude of names, incomprehensible memoranda of incidents. Of the latter one has stuck in my memory. "Lancelot Sinlow seduces Guinevere the false 'Immaculata' and Jehovah steps in." Other sheets were covered with meaningless phrases, the crude drawings that the writing man makes mechanically while he is thinking over his work, and arabesques such as we ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... gardens of the Tuileries, affords a most excellent idea of that stately style, as developed in France under Franois I. The whole of this splendid plan, however, has been rendered futile by the destruction of the Tuileries, without which the enclosure becomes wholly meaningless. ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... the formula that defines the law of each individual life. All this is not intended to mean that we have each named a clear and definite ideal which is our chosen goal. On the contrary, such a conception may be almost meaningless to some of us. In general the higher the ideal the vaguer and less vivid is its presentation to our consciousness. But, named or unnamed, sharp or blurred, vivid or half-forgotten, there may be found in the heart of every man that which of all things he wants to ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... embargo was laid upon the Customs funds. The Northern troops, raised and trained by Yuan Shih-kai, when he was Viceroy of the Metropolitan province, were, it is true, proving themselves the masters of the Yangtsze and South China troops; yet that circumstance was meaningless. Those troops were fighting for what had already proved itself a lost cause—the Peking System as well as the Manchu dynasty. The fight turned more and more into a money-fight. It was foreign money which brought about the first ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... her? She had fallen back in her chair and was still staring with parted lips at the dark pane that a minute ago had framed the horrid countenance. When at last she spoke, her words were wild and meaningless, with a dreadful mockery of laughter that sent a swift pang of apprehension to ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... come, and Danvers, unfamiliar with death, knew no words of consolation for the father bereft of his firstborn. A numbness mercifully comes during those first hours, which makes it possible to move about and go through strange, meaningless ceremonies with a calm that surprises those who have not known the searing ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... gazing into his cabinet, fathoms deep in thought. That Miss Heth was responsible for a meaningless lie which took away more than life itself from one who had loved her truly in his way: this was a hypothesis so wild and weak that it collapsed at the first opportunity for calm, just examination. The sight of her again, the other night, had merely clinched the matter; driven by a glance the ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... all vague, meaningless, incomprehensible to Ranny. He only remembered afterward, long afterward, that on that night when he had spoken of Mercier she ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... meaningless words have always been the favorite components of verbal charms, whose power, in the opinion of medieval conjurers, was in direct ratio to their obscurity;[38:3] and this fact is well shown in ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... twenty-one years and seven months. He was by no means a handsome man—perhaps the reverse. The contour of his face was somewhat angular and harsh. His forehead was lofty and very fair; his nose a snub; his eyes large, heavy, glassy, and meaningless. About the mouth there was more to be observed. The lips were gently protruded, and rested the one upon the other, after such a fashion that it is impossible to conceive any, even the most complex, combination ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe |
