"Nothingness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... fear, solves life's every problem! But first—Bring ye all the tithes into the storehouse, that there may be meat in mine house. Bring your whole confidence, your trust, your knowledge of the allness of good, and the nothingness of evil. Bring, too, your every earthly hope, every mad ambition, every corroding fear, and carnal belief; lay them down at the doorway of mine ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... for an hour to try the fishing. It was here that I hooked two mysterious creatures, each of which took the fly when it was below the surface, pulled for a few moments in a sullen way and then apparently melted into nothingness. It will always be a source of regret to me that the nature of these fish must remain unknown. While they were on the line it was the general opinion that they were heavy trout; but no sooner had they departed, than I became ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... the day when I gave my heart to you, my life was yours wholly. If a doubt or a suspicion comes to you, question me. The present is yours, and you know well there is only you, you alone, in it. As for my past, if you knew what nothingness it was you would be glad. I do not think another woman made as I was, to love, would have brought to you a mind newer to love than is mine. That I swear to you. The years that were spent without you—I did not live! Let us not talk of them. There is nothing in them of which I should be ashamed. ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... pleading before the people of Athens, Socrates says, "Let us reflect in another way, and we shall see that there is great reason to hope that death is a good; for one of two things—either death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another. Now if you suppose that there is no consciousness, but a sleep like the sleep of him who is undisturbed even by the sight of dreams, death ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... poser, as Bea was inclined to take only one step at a time and utter one thought as it obligingly arrived, without anxiety about the next. This tendency had occasionally landed her high and dry on the shores of nothingness in the classroom. ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz
... what has God made us? and why are we doomed to thus frail and unquiet existence? Who does not feel all this? in whose heart does it not provoke appeal to, and dependence on, God? before whose eyes does it not bring the folly and the nothingness of ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... thought, "that I have misunderstood you. They say space could not possibly be curved, for space is emptiness, and how could empty nothingness be curved." ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell
... faith; but the road to this point is long, and sown thick with obstacles, and at the moment at which we have arrived he had not yet entered upon it, he did not even suspect its existence; all he knew was that pleasure leads to nothingness, ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... and bespatter it with blood, but that would not hinder it from plunging itself into nothingness in the ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... sinless, healed the sick, and that he "demonstrated" over death in the sepulcher and rose on the third day. His sacrifice had no more efficacy than that of any other man who dies as a result of his labors to bring a new truth into the world, and we profit by his death only as we realize the nothingness of sickness, sin, and death. "God's wrath, vented on his only son, is without logic or humanity, and but a ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... seems to me, Of all is infidelity; And so, if I may choose, I'll miss The kind of heaven which comes to this. If doom'd, indeed, this fever ceased, To die out wholly, like a beast, Forgetting all life's ill success In dark and peaceful nothingness, I could but say, Thy will be done; For, dying thus, I were but one Of seed innumerable which ne'er In all the worlds shall bloom or bear. I've put life past to so poor use Well may'st Thou life to come refuse; And ...
— The Victories of Love - and Other Poems • Coventry Patmore
... the world was due to this short period of intensive training, "under men who were intelligent enough to know just what was needed and just how to go about to secure it"—men not hampered by any pedagogical nonsense or grown stale over a long attempt to discriminate between the "infinity of nothingness and the nothingness of infinity" (as one might summarize a rather common criticism), rather than to the former years of patient toil, and discipline, and accomplishment which had really laid the foundation so well that all were able thus to respond. The common school, the high school, ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... guest were Susan and Liosha. Well, Susan was nine years old and a meal at which a guest broke her whole decalogue of table manners at once—to say nothing of the performance of such miracles as squeezing an orange into nothingness, without the juice running out, and subsequently extracting it from the neck of an agonised mother—was a feast of memorable gaudiness. Susan could be excused. But Liosha? Liosha, pupil of the admirable Mrs. Considine? Liosha, descendant of proud Albanian chieftains who had lain ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... and the sorrow-nurtured, (One with nothingness though all things be,— Great lord Sirius and the moving planets Fleet as ...
— Behind the Arras - A Book of the Unseen • Bliss Carman
... we were sailing a big toy-boat in an illimitable porcelain bathtub. There were no rocks to look out for, no shoals in what was really one vast shoal, and all was smooth as milk. All the afternoon, till the sun set and the stars came out and we dropped our anchor in a luminous nothingness, a child could have navigated us; but, when the next day brought us up to the northwest corner of Andros, we found ourselves face to face with a variety of difficulties: glimmering sandbars, reaches of moon-white shoals, patches of half-made land with pines ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... tremble to the Cathedral of the Sacred Thorn in Cameliard. All night Jurgen prayed there, not in repentance, but in terror. For his dead he prayed, that they should not have been blotted out in nothingness, for the dead among his kindred whom he had loved in boyhood, and for these only. About the men and women whom he had known since then he did not seem to care, or not at least so vitally. But he put up a sort of prayer for Dame Lisa—"wherever my dear wife may be, and, O God, grant ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... matter. But does not the continual mutation of matter and the universal lot of final dissolution teach us the unessential character of this union, and that it is no intimate fusion? Art, accordingly, in the merely superficial animation of its works, but represents Nothingness ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... companion. She was gazing up at him with a strange expression of gladness, of relief, on her face. The long years of restraint and measured coldness seemed to have vanished, receded into nothingness. ...
— The Uttermost Farthing • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... him, met a knowing and conscious smile, looked right through the smile, and looked away again, all with the air of one who gazes out into nothingness. ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... quickly renew the falling ranks of life. To us on earth, the disappearance of those we love and cherish, the sundering of ties which a lifetime of love and companionship has established, the sharp vanishing away into nothingness and silence of the faces and spirits of the great and glorious, the good, the helpful, the true and noble, has made death an awful, hideous, ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... disposed the hearts of thoughtless clerks, eminent lawyers, and grave judges and others-between whom and herself there seemed to her almost an infinite remove-to listen to her suit with patient and respectful attention, backing it up with all needed aid. The sense of her nothingness in the eyes of those with whom she contended for her rights, sometimes fell on her like a heavy weight, which nothing but her unwavering confidence in an arm which she believed to be stronger than all others combined could have raised ...
— The Narrative of Sojourner Truth • Sojourner Truth
... at work, putting up tents for a hospital. Some thirty miles ahead was the front, and you heard the guns off and on, a low sullen roar, punctuated with hammer-strokes f big fellows. Millions of dollars every hour were being blown to nothingness in that fearful inferno; a gigantic meat-mill that was grinding up the bodies of men and had never ceased day or night for nearly four years. You could be a violent pacifist in sound of those guns, or ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... time, and night and frost are close at hand. The rose hour has struck already for '93. The garden beds are full of scattered petals and the dusty roadways glimmer with ghostly blossoms too wan to be roses, and wafted by a breath into nothingness. With such a calendar to mark the advance of decay and death the seasons differ from the mortal race which substitutes aches and pains for a horologe of flowers, and grows old by processes of physical failure ...
— A String of Amber Beads • Martha Everts Holden
... whatever to rest upon, and hence the attempts to use it as a guide in the practical concerns of life are mere folly.—Moreover, Buddha by propounding the three mutually contradictory systems, teaching respectively the reality of the external world, the reality of ideas only, and general nothingness, has himself made it clear either that he was a man given to make incoherent assertions, or else that hatred of all beings induced him to propound absurd doctrines by accepting which they would become thoroughly confused.—So ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... awful time? Nowhere within the ken of the banished youth. In his own feeling Cosmo was outside the city of life—not even among the dogs—outside with bare nothingness—cold negation. Alas for him who had so lately offered to help another to pray, thinking the hour would never come to him when he could not pray! It had COME! He did not try to pray. The thought of prayer did not wake in him! Let no one say he was punished for ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... man, O! come and ponder here Upon the nothingness of human things— How vain, how very vain doth then appear The city's hum, the pomp and pride of kings; All that from wealth, power, grandeur, beauty springs, Alike must fade, die, perish, be forgot; E'en he whose feeble hand now strikes the strings Soon, soon ...
— The Mirror Of Literature, Amusement, And Instruction, No. 391 - Vol. 14, No. 391, Saturday, September 26, 1829 • Various
... him o'er the dead Ere the first day of death is fled; The first dark day of nothingness. The last of danger and distress: Before Decay's effacing fingers, Have swept the lines where beauty lingers, And mark'd the mild, angelic air, The rapture of repose that's there; The fix'd, yet tender traits that streak The languor ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... that ye are, why have ye reared Your wordy rancour 'mid the city's harms? Have you no shame, to stir up private broils In such a time as this? Get thee within! (To OED) And thou too, Creon! nor enlarge your griefs To make a mountain out of nothingness. ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... fading meteors of his day. Epicurus is said to have borrowed from no writer in his three hundred inspired volumes, while Plutarch, Seneca, and the elder Pliny made such free use of their libraries; and it has happened that Epicurus, with his unsubstantial nothingness, has "melted into thin air," while the solid treasures have buoyed themselves up amidst the ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... promote it, or it ceases not only to work but to be. For it exists only as it is made or rather only in the act and fact of its progress, and so for it not to progress is at once to return to impotence and nothingness. And it is we who maintain it in being, maintaining it by endless reiterated efforts of reflection, and so maintaining it we maintain ourselves, resting or relying upon it and using it as a source ...
— Progress and History • Various
... How far it seemed to summer-time in Angela's thoughts! What a long gulf of nothingness to be bridged over, what a dull level plain to cross, before June and the roses could come round again, bringing with them the memory of last summer; and the days she had lived under the same roof with Fareham, and the ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... feeling of being adrift in unmeasurable nothingness making him sick, to watch mistily as the blue beast came to a halt. Whimpering it turned, but before it reached the level of the woods, it sagged to its knees, fell face forward and was still, a destructive machine no longer ...
— Star Hunter • Andre Alice Norton
... streets of Paris, has not a philosophic mind. Truth to say he has nothing. He is one of the disinherited. Properly speaking, he has no existence at all, or, to be strictly truthful, he had no existence till M. Anatole France's philosophic mind and human sympathy have called him up from his nothingness for our pleasure, and, as the title-page of the book has it, no doubt for our ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... this something that in his temerity he had dared invoke—that rose now engulfing him, a puny maggot—that snatched him up and flung him headlong, shackled, before this nebulous, terrifying tribunal, where out of nothingness, out of a void, the calm, majestic features of the Patriarch took form and changed, and changed, and kept changing, and grew implacable, set with the stamp of doom. What was it—in God's name, what was it brought these sweat beads ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... paradox at first, but true—a rainbow is one of the most awful things in the world, because it reminds us that what has created it is the terrible light which, without the atmosphere, would scorch to nothingness; for, while the sun, through the medium of the atmosphere, blesses, let its flames, mountains high, touch a planet that has drifted from its course, and it scorches ...
— The After-glow of a Great Reign - Four Addresses Delivered in St. Paul's Cathedral • A. F. Winnington Ingram
... indifference to human glories. In our France of the nineteenth century, fickle as it has been, inconstant, fertile in revolutions, recantations, and changes of every sort, this lesson is more impressive than it has been at any period of our history. Never has Providence shown more clearly the nothingness of this world's grandeur and magnificence. Never has the saying of Ecclesiastes been more exactly verified: "Vanity of vanities; all is vanity!" We have before us the task of describing one of the most sumptuous courts that ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... the cultivated was to him a refreshment, and because he brought with him a good appetite and good humor, resting upon conscientious work. He could show interest in divers trifles, because in their nothingness (quite contrary to the trifles in which half an hour previous, with painful interest, he had ferreted out crime), they appeared to him as belonging to an innocent, childish world; and if conversation approached more earnest things, he spoke ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors • Various
... ahead into the infinite sandy waste, where whispering yuccas and thorny cactus grew, and jack rabbits went looping away among bronze greasewood bushes. A cloud of dust hung over the wagon trail. Ahead stretched seeming nothingness ...
— The She Boss - A Western Story • Arthur Preston Hankins
... the name of Jesus—I'll not tell thee: I have seen more than man can see, and live: God, when He grants the tree of knowledge, bans The luckless seer from off the tree of life, Lest he become as gods, and burst with pride; Or sick at sight of his own nothingness, Lie down, and be a fiend: my time is near: Well—I have neither child, nor kin, nor friend, Save thee, my son; I shall go lightly forth. Thou knowest we start for Marpurg on the morrow? Thou ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... victory, with the shouts of Orleans still ringing in her ears, the applause of her fellow-soldiers, the sound of the triumphant bells, was plunged all at once into the indolence, the intrigues, the busy nothingness of the Court, in which whispering favourites surrounded a foolish young prince, beguiling him into foolish amusements, alarming him with coward fears. Wise men and buffoons alike dragged him down into that paltry abyss, the one always counselling caution, the other inventing amusements. ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... Civil War he rose to important rank; as a lawyer he developed a large practice; as an author he wrote books that reached a mighty total of sales. He left the law for the ministry and is the active head of a great church that he raised from nothingness. He is the most popular lecturer in the world and yearly speaks to many thousands. He is, so to speak, the discoverer of "Acres of Diamonds," through which thousands of men and women have achieved success out of failure. He is ...
— Acres of Diamonds • Russell H. Conwell
... such a peculiar state that she would put her hands over her face, as if doubting her own identity. Was she herself only an illusion, and would she suddenly disappear some day and vanish into nothingness? Who ...
— The Dream • Emile Zola
... This idea spun to nothingness very quickly. No! The figure ashore reminded Ruth Fielding of nobody whom she had seen recently. The feeling, however, that ...
— Ruth Fielding At College - or The Missing Examination Papers • Alice B. Emerson
... death of anyone a kind of stupefaction; so difficult is it to grasp this advent of nothingness and to resign ourselves to believe in it. But still, when he saw that she did not move, Charles ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... smote him was as a hand of molten lead. In torture his gallant spirit passed away, uncomplaining, loving through his pain the maid for whose dear sake he had brought woe upon himself. As the last white ashes in the fire crumbled and fell away into nothingness, the soul of Meleager departed. Swiftly through the dark valley his mother's shade followed him, for she fell upon a sword and so perished. And Diana, looking down on the grief-stricken sisters of Meleager and on the bitter sorrow of his ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... credit for wisdom in all His plans, the wisdom of providing His agencies with the means to reach the end they are destined to attain. To commission a church to teach all men without authority, is to condemn it to utter nothingness from the very beginning. To expect men to accept the truths He revealed, and such truths! without a guarantee against error in the infallibility of the teacher, is to be ignorant of human nature. And since at no time must it cease to teach, it must be indefectible. Being true, it must ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... outward symbols of perfection, 'the discovery, the new faculty, the privileged apprehension' by which 'the imaginative regeneration of the world' should be brought about, or even, at times, a brooding over 'what the soul passes, and must pass, through, aux abois with nothingness, or with those offended mysterious powers that may really ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... apart from his fellows. Neither by daytime nor by nighttime was he thereafter to know darkness. Never again was he to see the twilight fall or face the blackness which comes before the dawning or take his rest in the cloaking, kindly void and nothingness of the midnight. Before the dusk of evening came, in midafternoon sometimes, of stormy and briefened winter days, or in the full radiance of the sun's sinking in the summertime, he was within doors lighting the lights which would keep the ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... commanding knowledge of foreign affairs, now of such paramount importance to the State, and by his entire sympathy with the views of the King. The King hated Pulteney—had never forgiven him his championship of the Prince of Wales—and would be delighted to see him reduced to nothingness by a removal to the House of Lords. But if it was plain alike to such men of intellect as Walpole and Carteret, and to such stupid men as King George and the Duke of Newcastle, that removal to the House ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... ancient philosophy that the life of the wise man should be a contemplation of, and a preparation for, death. It certainly was so with Marcus Aurelius. The thoughts of the nothingness of man, and of that great sea of oblivion which shall hereafter swallow up all that he is and does, are ever present to his mind; they are thoughts to which he recurs more constantly than any other, and from which he always draws ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... all that is good; and next to make offerings to Earth and to the dead, and specially to thy husband King Darius, whom thou sawest in visions of the night, that he may send blessings from below to thy son, and turn away all trouble into darkness and nothingness." ...
— Stories from the Greek Tragedians • Alfred Church
... far below the Leech-Gatherer's has been reached, and mind and body alike are in their last decay, the life of the Old Cumberland Beggar, at one remove from nothingness, has yet a dignity and a usefulness of its own. His fading days are passed in no sad asylum of vicious or gloomy age, but amid neighbourly kindnesses, and in the sanity of the open air; and a life that is reduced to its barest elements has yet a hold on the liberality of nature and the affections ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... unfearing, Where Fantasy self-damned in its own torment lies, Still onward to that pass-way steering, Around whose narrow mouth hell-flames forever rise; Calmly to dare the step, serene, unshrinking, Though into nothingness the hour should see thee sinking. Now, then, come down from thy old case, I bid thee, Where thou, forgotten, many a year hast hid thee, Into thy master's hand, pure, crystal glass! The joy-feasts of the fathers thou hast brightened, The hearts of gravest guests were lightened, When, ...
— Faust • Goethe
... difficulty—that there is nowhere in the world anybody, any type of men, any organisation, any idea, any nucleus or germ, that could possibly develop into the necessary over-Government. We are asking for something out of the air, out of nothingness, that will necessarily array against itself the resistance of all those who are in control, or interested in the control, of the affairs of sovereign States of the world as they are at present; the resistance ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... worlds beyond ours, and account it madness to say there is nothing. Nonentity is incompatible with the infinite entity of God. They lay down two principles of metaphysics, entity which is the highest God, and nothingness which is the defect of entity. Evil and sin come of the propensity to nothingness; the sin having its cause not efficient, but in deficiency. Deficiency is, they say, of power, wisdom or will. Sin they place in the last of these three, because ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... motives plain to us if it were not for our own stupid prejudices and density. Ah! these are critical times, but I believe what a fellow-countryman of mine has already written—I believe that the women will save us. I do not fear the fate of the older peoples. I am sure that we shall not fall into nothingness from the present height of our civilization, by reason of our sensuality and vice, as all the great nations have done, heretofore. The women will rebel. The women will not allow it. But"—he added ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... of beauty is a joy for ever: Its loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness; but still will keep A bower quiet for us, and a sleep Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing. Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing A flowery band to bind us to the earth, Spite ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... surrounded by pictures and statues, rich, happy and at ease, he watched with a paternal smile, his gloomy creations marching in dismal procession across the frontiers of France. Byron replied to him by a cry of grief which made Greece tremble, and suspended "Manfred" over the abyss as if nothingness had been the answer of the hideous enigma, with which ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... deck of an outbound steamer stood two figures. The sky was gray. Drifts of fog hung plume-like over Alcatraz, veiled the Exposition domes and turrets in a mystic glory. Sometimes it was like a great white nothingness; then, as if by magic, Color, Forms and Beauty leaped forth like some startling vision from ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... dried her eyes hastily with her poor little wet ball of a handkerchief; for she knows that Willie is a privileged visitor in my studio. The door opened (it was ajar), and Ronald Macdonald strode into the room. I hope I may never have the same sense of nothingness again! To be young, pleasing, gifted, and to be regarded no more than a fly upon the wall, is death to ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... quietude of the mind is also apt to be disturbed by sordid and perplexing cares. Its awful sublimity overwhelmed my faculties, and its majesty inspired me with a kind of dread. In presence of these countless orbs my own nothingness came home to me, and a voice seemed to whisper ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... by the natural reason—a thing that melts away inevitably first to haze, and then to utter nothingness. And for a time we feel convinced that it really is nothing. Let us, however, again retire from it to the common distance, and the phantom we thought exorcised is again back in an instant. There is the sphinx once more, distinct and clear as ever, holding ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... time, the face was so spiritually mighty, yet so proudly, so austerely sad, that Harris felt as he stared, that the sight was more than his eyes could meet, and that in another moment the power of vision would fail him altogether, and he must sink into utter nothingness. ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... rich in memorials of the olden times, as will appear by the sequel to the present paper—those strongholds of ancient despotism, which, by their very ruin, tell of the nothingness of man's power and ambition. We append the following observations of Mr. Britton, who has done more to make the study of antiquities popular, it has been truly observed, than all other antiquaries, past and present, put together. They do honour to his head and heart. After stating that ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 478, Saturday, February 26, 1831 • Various
... in this very null and he knew he would probably lose more. Despite the vigilance of the surrogates, they kept slipping across the river and disappearing into that swirling nothingness. And now, ...
— The Weakling • Everett B. Cole
... sight, every mental faculty was instantly concentrated upon the single sense of hearing. My conductor had left me. There was the sound of a closing door and of padded foot-falls that trailed off into nothingness; then silence. ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... the act, are creditably of a piece with Friedrich Wilhelm; physiognomic of the rugged veracious man. It is one of several such acts done by him: for it was a duty apt to recur in Germany, in his day. This duty Friedrich Wilhelm, a solid Protestant after his sort, and convinced of the "nothingness and nonsensicality (UNGRUND UND ABSURDITAT) of Papistry," was always honorably prompt to do. There is an honest bacon-and-greens conscience in the man; almost the one conscience you can find in any royal man of that day. Promptly, without tremulous counting of costs, he ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... had made life pleasant. In sober reason I had no more cause to deplore Ellen's marriage than to feel aggrieved because Grant had succeeded Johnson as President. Nevertheless, you can scarcely conceive how much this affair—I mean the marriage—grieved me. My absolute nothingness suddenly stared me in the face. I saw myself as I was—a mere schoolmaster, with no motive for pride in the past, or pleasure in the present, or hope ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German • Various
... night from the Green below. Dozens of lighted windows gleam softly through the foliage, for all the world like witches' lamps. The day reveals thin, blue plumes of smoke stealing out of the tops of the trees to be wafted off into nothingness; they come from invisible chimneys far down in the leafy fastnesses. Up here are the huts of the newly married. Almost without exception, they are tiny affairs, scarcely larger than the metaphorical bandbox. ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... receding with it, subject to one eternal law he could not read. How the suffering and sin of one was the burden of all: the heroic endeavours and victories of one the gain of all. The little isolated aim of the individual must subject itself to the wider meaning or be swept back to nothingness, just as the stranded pools among the rocks that for a few hours caught the sunshine and reflected the heavenly lamp, but were overswept each tide and their being mingled ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... opportunities they had for adulating him, of attributing everything to him, and of pretending to learn everything from him. Suppleness, meanness, an admiring, dependent, cringing manner—above all, an air of nothingness—were the sole means ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... we not indeed the victim? But though I spoke of weariness, I must take back the words; for here too we have indeed the beauty and the glory of suffering, and here the beauty and the glory of manhood. Guido, like all evil things, is Nothingness: he serves but to show forth what purity and love, in Pompilia, could be; what bravery and love, in Caponsacchi, the "warrior-priest," could do. This girl has not the Browning-mark of gaiety, but she has both the others—this "lady young, tall, beautiful, strange, and sad," who answered without ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... walked automatically along the way by which he had come, and, entering his hotel, sat down over the breakfast, staring at nothingness. He went on eating and drinking unconsciously till on a sudden he demanded his bill; having paid which, he took his dressing-bag in his hand, the only luggage he had brought with him, and ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... Republicans could have inaugurated their officers and administered their governments they would have received the applause of the administration at Washington and the God-speed of the Republican party of the North; but the moment the United States troops were withdrawn the Negro governments melted into nothingness. ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... silence. Sinan, Lord of Death, seemed to be lost in thought under the black shade of his canopy; the double line of dais stared at nothingness across the passage way; the giant guards stood still as statues; Masouda watched the brethren from beneath her long eye-lashes, while the brethren watched the sharp edge of the shadow of the canopy on the marble floor. They strove to seem unconcerned, but their hearts ...
— The Brethren • H. Rider Haggard
... can man cease to be. Never can he return to that awful center of nothingness, or be absorbed within the bosom of the unmanifested being. On, and on, and on, with Deific power, God moves in ever-increasing ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... presence of the Deity, and at the same time to show that the monarch was a being of superhuman greatness, these edifices were well adapted to accomplish their purpose. The Egyptian beholder and worshiper was not to be attracted and charmed, but overwhelmed. His own nothingness and the terribleness of the power and the will of God was what he was to feel. But, if the awfulness of Deity was thus inculcated, the divine power of the Pharaoh was not less strikingly set forth. He is seen ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... commentator uses the illustration of a tree. Before birth the tree was not; and after destruction, it is not; only in the interim, it is. Its formlessness or nothingness is manifest from these two states, for it has been said that which did not exist in the past and will not exist in the future cannot be regarded as existing in the present. Tadgatah is explained by the ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... state we are conscious of the objective universe. In dreaming we are conscious of the inner world. Then we are of great help to the living, and also the misnamed dead. In dreamlessness the true seer turns the light of consciousness back upon itself and in its own light sees the gloom of nothingness. Imagine for a moment the absolute non-existence of the vast world devoid of sight and sound. What remains a vast space. Imagine the vast space to be void of ether and the subtle seeds of creation. Perfect stillness reigns supreme ...
— The Secret of Dreams • Yacki Raizizun
... race. Who talks of kindness and goodness in face of a scene like this? We know nothing. The hundred fishermen die, and the unpoisoned millions live. We are shadows; we have not a single right. If I die to-night, I shall have been spent by an Almighty Power that has used me. Will He cast me to nothingness after I have fulfilled my purpose? Never. There is not a gust of this wind that does not move truly according to eternal law; there can be no injustice, for no one can judge the Judge. If I suffer the petty pang of Death while a great purpose is being wrought out, I have no more reason ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... away. What can be lasting in this world? To-day disappears in the abyss of nothingness; It is but the passing image of a dream, and causes ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... seems to us so short—and so long! A thousand, perhaps ten thousand such, end to end, and we have the life of a world. And what is that? A cycle! A thing self-created, self-destructive: then of human life—nothingness. Oh, it's humorous! Our life, a ten thousandth part of that nothingness; and so full of tiny—great struggles and worries!" She was silent a moment, her throat trembling, a multitude of expressions ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... daubs, reeking with horror. It was life that was suffering the last agonies there, amidst that deathlike quiver of the atmosphere, upon those altars which resembled tombs, in that bare vault which looked like a sepulchre. The surroundings all spoke of slaughter and gloom, terror and anguish and nothingness. A faint scent of incense still lingered there, like the last expiring breath of some dead girl, who had been hurriedly stifled ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... through its opposite alone: gentleness through sternness, love through anger, affirmation through negation. Without evil there would be no life, no movement, no distinctions, no revelation; all would be unqualified, uniform nothingness. And as in nature nothing exists in which good and evil do not reside, so in God, besides power or the good, a contrary exists, without which he would remain unknown to himself. The theogonic process is twofold: self-knowledge on the part of ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... him he had so sagely anticipated. He could sleep to-night. And he did sleep. It was one of the nights he used to have after long tramps about Wake Hill, when his tired legs thrilled deliciously before they sank into a swoon of nothingness. ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... rhythmical deepening of the central hue. The wash of my wading seems not to affect them. I become conscious of the sudden appearance and swift disappearance of lesser spheres of startling brilliance. They emerge from nothingness, pause for a moment, and shoot towards me with extraordinary impulse. Each is a mere globule, resplendently blue. The tint intensifies as with accelerated velocity the atom flies until of its own ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... The Colonel rings a bell and an aged beldame approaches, making a deep curtsy and offering me a beaker of milk, a crusty loaf, a few venison pasties, and a cold goose stuffed with humming birds. When I have reduced these to nothingness I ask if the yellow house on the outskirts of the village is still vacant, and the Colonel replies that it is, at which unexpected but hoped-for answer I fall into a deep swoon. When I awake the aged Colonel is bending over me, his long ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... exultant. Some of the shame had been wiped away. He could feel again the riotous happiness that had surged up in him as he struck that face, felt it yield before him, saw it fade away into dust and nothingness. That face that had for all these months been haunting him, at last he had banished it, and with it had gone those other leering faces that had for so long kept him company. His room was dark, and it was always in the dark that they came to him—Hogg's, the ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... understands both—the void in his life, the powerlessness of his will. He understands that, like all other energy, spiritual power is contained in Environment. He finds here at last the true root of all human frailty, emptiness, nothingness, sin. This is why "without Me ye can do nothing." Powerlessness is the normal state not only of this but of every organism—of every organism ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... is Harry; and they say the poor thing can preach; forgive me what I have done to him, oh Lord! It is the weakness of man grasping the things of this world, to leave behind for the world's nothingness," says Mr. M'Fadden, as the woman leaves the room giving an ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... was with gratitude to the original projectors of these institutions that we gazed on the soul-exciting scene before us. We thought of the enchantments related in the Arabian Nights' Entertainments, and they faded away into nothingness compared ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... and yet with a peace in his heart that he had not known for years. He had saved his friend from the first wild melee of the war—the war that promised rest and nothingness to him, even while he kept his promise to "live ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... rebelliousness; still I rebelled. It seemed a dreadful thing that God should hang one's eternal destiny on things that were not in one's own power. I thought that if people could not do all that God required of them, He ought to allow them to fall back into their original nothingness. My mind especially revolted against the arrangement which God was said to have made with Adam, and the terrible consequences entailed thereby on his posterity. To bring men into being, and force them to live on forever, and at the same time to hang their eternal ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... languor—motionless, We lie and dream of nothingness; For visions come From Poppydom Direct at our command: Or, delicate alternative, In open idleness we live, With lyre and lute And silver flute, ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... friend," said the elder of these ladies, "it is in these hours of solitude and calm that we are most deeply impressed with the nothingness of life. Thou, my sweet convert, art now the object, no longer of my compassion, but my envy; and earnestly do I feel convinced of the blessed repose thy spirit will enjoy in the lap of the Mother Church. Happy are they who die young! ...
— Leila, Complete - The Siege of Granada • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... nothingness, and when he awoke from his reverie he was thinking that Nora Glynn had come into his life like a fountain, shedding living water upon it, awakening it. And taking pleasure in the simile, he said, ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... contemplation of it. You sometime since exprest an intention you had of finishing some extensive work on the Evidences of Natural and Revealed Religion. Have you let that intention go? Or are you doing any thing towards it? Make to yourself other ten talents. My letter is full of nothingness. I talk of nothing. But I must talk. I love to write to you. I take a pride in it. It makes me think less meanly of myself. It makes me think myself not totally disconnected from the better part of Mankind. I know, I am too dissatisfied with the beings ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... looked to Thee from the beginning, Straight up to Thee through all the world, Which, like an idle scroll, lay furled To nothingness on either side: And since the time Thou wast descried, Spite of the weak heart, so have I Lived ever, and so fain would die, Living and dying, ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... mass of lathering, leaping surges. In front, a vast nothingness, a black, unfathomable void, up through which gushed in clouds the ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... picture flying at a tremendous speed. Now stop, and then let us move backward in time, still gazing at the moving pictures. You see a strange sight, like that of 'reversing the film' in a moving picture. You see everything moving backward—cities crumbling into nothingness, men arising from their graves, and growing younger each second until they are finally born as babes—everything moving backward in time, instead of forward. You can thus witness any great historical event, or follow the ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... thinned into nothingness, but words were not necessary to tell either Caleb or Steve that she had been about to assert a prior claim which dated back years ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... delicate situation. Recollect if she is now a faded flower she has become so under your influence, and well may you be loth to lose the object who has shed her brightest hues on you, and who in giving birth to your sweet offspring may chance to fade almost to nothingness herself. But this should serve to bind your affections still stronger to her. Forgive me for talking thus to you, my dear Clare. I have no other motive than your domestic happiness, which I anxiously pray may be undisturbed by any event. ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... water which is pushed back by the contained air. Just as such bubbles are not water, but are precisely the spots from which water is absent, so these units are not koilon, but the absence of koilon—the only spots where it is not—specks of nothingness floating in it, so to speak, for the interior of these space-bubbles is an absolute void to the highest power of vision that ...
— Occult Chemistry - Clairvoyant Observations on the Chemical Elements • Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater
... portals of two mouths instead of one, flows and ebbs the tide of the great air-sea which feeds the life of man. With the sorrow of the mother, the new life is purchased for the child; our very being is redeemed from nothingness with the pains of a death of which ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 1 • George MacDonald
... opposition of soul and body a mere illusion, and the true self neither soul nor body, but the union of the two in the 'I' which is above them? And is death the assertion of this individuality in the higher nature, and the falling away into nothingness of the lower? Or are we vainly attempting to pass the boundaries of human thought? The body and the soul seem to be inseparable, not only in fact, but in our conceptions of them; and any philosophy which too closely unites them, or too widely ...
— Phaedo - The Last Hours Of Socrates • Plato
... and the last of his House, which had endured there about 300 years. Our clever Wilhelmina at Baireuth, though readers have forgotten the small circumstance, had married a superfluous Sister-in-law of hers to this Karl Edward; and, they say, it was some fond hope of progeny, suddenly dashed into nothingness, that finished the poor man, that night of May 25th. In any case, his Territory falls to Prussia, by Reich's Settlement of long standing (1683-1694); which had been confirmed anew to the late King, Friedrich Wilhelm:—we remember how he returned with it, honest man, from that KLADRUP ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... fermentation and decay. Worms find their way to the roots; the caterpillar eats into the "boll" and destroys the staple. It would be almost impossible to enumerate all the evils the cotton-plant is heir to, all of which, however, sink into nothingness compared with the scourge ...
— Camp-Fire and Cotton-Field • Thomas W. Knox
... envied his greatness, resented his leadership, and sought to shake him from his lofty place. But he stood serene and imperturbable, while that denial, like many another blast of evil-scented wind, passed into nothingness, even before the disappearance of the party strife out of whose fermentation it had arisen. By the unanimous judgment of his countrymen for two generations after his death he was hailed as Pater Patriae; and the age which conferred that title was too ingenuous to suppose that the father could ...
— The Americanism of Washington • Henry Van Dyke
... frightful cry,—the hoarse, hideous, indescribable cry of hopeless fear,—the despairing animal-cry man utters when suddenly brought face to face with Nothingness, without preparation, without consolation, without possibility of respite ... Sauve qui peut! Some wrenched down the doors; some clung to the heavy banquet-tables, to the sofas, to the billiard-tables:—during one terrible instant,—against fruitless heroisms, ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... could not see them. But I was plain enough to them, of course, and before I could see that a blow was coming one smote me heavily on the helm and I fell forward, while they leapt out over my body into the open again. Then I seemed to slip, and fell into nothingness ...
— King Olaf's Kinsman - A Story of the Last Saxon Struggle against the Danes in - the Days of Ironside and Cnut • Charles Whistler
... the work of Richard Strauss appears to me up to the present. Guntram kills Duke Robert, and immediately lets fall his sword. The frenzied laugh of Zarathustra ends in an avowal of discouraged impotence. The delirious passion of Don Juan dies away in nothingness. Don Quixote when dying forswears his illusions. Even the Hero himself admits the futility of his work, and seeks oblivion in an indifferent Nature. Nietzsche, speaking of the artists of our time, laughs at "those Tantaluses of the will, rebels and enemies of laws, who come, broken in spirit, and ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... the ghosts of trees were softly pencilled, Fainter and fainter, in distance fading, into nothingness gliding, But sometimes a crowd of the intricate silver trees of fairyland Passed, close and intensely clear, ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... letters between the Countess and Bakounine prepared the way; I was introduced to him at his house, and they discussed me there. I became a sort of Western prophet, a mystic charmer who was ready to nihilize the Latin races, the Saint Paul of the new religion of nothingness, and at last a day was fixed for us to meet in London. He lived in a small, one-storied house in Pimlico, with a tiny garden in front, and nothing noticeable ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... vigorous strokes, the Hebrew poet describes the nothingness of man in the face of the vast world. The lot of the Hamlets and of the Renes is more enviable than that of the "Mourner" of the ghetto. They at least taste of life before becoming a prey to melancholy and delivering themselves up to pessimism. They know the charms of living ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... Butler. Filled with remorse, he ran upstairs without taking off his hat or overcoat. The feeling of resentment toward Butler was lost in this new, overpowering sense of dread; the discovery of his own lamentable unfitness for "high life" expeditions faded into nothingness in the face of this possible catastrophe. What if Phoebe were to die? He would be to blame. He remembered feeling that he should not have left her that evening. It had been a premonition, and this was to be the ...
— What's-His-Name • George Barr McCutcheon
... round our life with nothingness, tis haply best; Thy toils and troubles, want and woe at length ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... the doctrines of the atomists, incorporealists, epicureans, theists, and atheists, and all the other races of dreamers that have disturbed the common sense, lethargy, or comfort of the world for thousands of years; so that nothing could have better proved the absolute nothingness of their favourite maxim, that nothing could come from nothing, than the effects of that very dogma itself, for nothing ever made such a stir in the moral world, since it deserved to be called something. But a ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... is giddy. My pulse vibrates irregularly, and my heart beats with an audible distinctness. I am oppressed with a sense of my own nothingness—an atom, almost invisible, upon the breast of the ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... life, a sick epicure's dream, Incoherent and gross, even grosser had past, Were it not for that cordial and soul-giving beam Which his friendship and wit o'er thy nothingness cast:— ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... and of the Durance are said to be covered with dead carcases, upon which the dogs are feeding. Garnier de Saintes addresses from the tribune the royalists of France. "Insects," (says he) "return "to your nothingness; ye shall perish, whilst we "shall be masters of the world, with which we will "share our fortune and our liberty." Tallien prophesies, that before three months a counter-revolution will be effected; and he therefore advises ...
— Historical Epochs of the French Revolution • H. Goudemetz
... are simply nothing by comparison with infinity. It is a startling thought, doubtless, that periods of time compared with which the life of a man, the existence of a nation, nay, the duration of the human race itself, sink into insignificance, should themselves in turn be dwarfed into nothingness by comparison with periods of a still higher order. But the thought is not more startling than that other thought which we have been compelled to admit—the thought that the earth on which we live, and the solar system to which ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... as though she and her mother were ruined, and as though the National Reformation Society had been guilty of a fearful crime against a widow and an orphan. The lovely vision of immeasurable wealth had flashed and scintillated for a month in front of her dazzled eyes—and then blackness, nothingness, the dark void! She knew that she would ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... As the driver's only response to my command was to grin at us reassuringly over his shoulder, I looked about for a soft place to land. But there was only rock-plated highway whizzing past and on the outside the road dropped sheer away into nothingness. We took the first turn with the near-side wheels in the gutter, the off-side wheels on the bank, and the car tilted at an angle of forty-five degrees. The second bend we navigated at an angle of sixty degrees, the off-side wheels on the bank, the near-side wheels pawing thin ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell
... felicity. How it is possible for those who have once tasted this, the sweetest of all human delights, how it is possible for any rational mind afterwards to submit to be whirled round in the vortex of dissipation, to tolerate, to endure, the empty, vain, comfortless, nothingness of fashionable amusements, now appears to me to be almost inexplicable. The real felicity imparted and received in a happy domestic circle, in one evening, far, very far surpasses all the pleasures derived from the gaze and throng of crowded routs and fashionable ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... given sign of more noble bravery than he? He had stood to defend her name and fame. He was very love, the never extinguished torch of love. And he hung on her for the little of life appearing to remain to him. Before heaven he was guiltless. He was good. Her misery had shrunk her into nothingness, and she rose out of nothingness cold and bloodless, bearing a thought that she might make a good youth happy, or nurse him sinking—be of that use. Besides he was a refuge from the roof of her parents. She shut her eyes on the past, sure of his goodness; goodness, on her return to some sense ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... discouragements. Between us must no type nor symbol stand, No mediator, were he more divine Than the incarnate Christ. All forms, all priests, I part aside, and hold communion free Beneath the empty sky of noon, with naught Between my nothingness and thy high heavens— Spirit with spirit. O, have mercy, God! Cleanse me from lust and bitterness and pride, Have mercy in accordance with my faith." Long time he lay upon the scorching grass, With his face buried in the tangled weeds. Ah! who can tell the struggles of his soul Against its demons ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... Left us, since Aeacus' son in battle fell, Was Aias' mighty strength. And now the Gods Will to our loss destroy him, bringing bane On thee and me, that all we may fill up The cup of doom, and pass to nothingness." ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... beautiful And holy visions that have passed away And left no shadow of their loveliness On the dead waste of life. That spectre lifts The coffin-lid of hope, and joy, and love, And, bending mournfully above the pale, Sweet forms that slumber there, scatters dead flowers O'er what has passed to nothingness. ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... in awhile it would roll upward and show a long, flat expanse of water, tempting us to believe that the blessed sky was coming out at last; but soon the veil fell again, and we aimlessly wondered where we were and whither we were drifting. There is something awful and mysterious in the shadowy nothingness that surrounds one in a fog at sea. You fancy that out of that impenetrable mist may suddenly burst some great disaster or danger. Strange shapes appear to be forming themselves in the obscurity out of which they emerge, and the eye is ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... seem widely separated; but a strong kinship exists between them, for all that. I open Professor Aytoun's book, and all this modern life—with its railways, its newspapers, its crowded cities, its Lancashire distresses, its debates in Parliament—fades into nothingness and silence. Scotland, from Edinburgh rock to the Tweed, stretches away in rude spaces of moor and forest. The wind blows across it, unpolluted by the smoke of towns. That which lives now has not yet come into existence; what are to-day crumbling and ivied ruins, are warm with household fires, ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... her, she sank back, her eyes closed wearily. As he laid her gently back upon the pillows, she sighed softly, her heavy lids unclosed a moment. "I knew you'd come," she murmured. "You'll take care of—of Dorothy—you will—" Her voice trailed off into nothingness; then "Marcus"—she whispered. ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... back the secret in his situation? Would you or I? Doubtful, if when smitten with love for a fair, sweet girl, we had felt that its telling would have riveted the bonds which, at the most, were only partly formed, and might dissolve into nothingness if ...
— Brave Tom - The Battle That Won • Edward S. Ellis
... culminate in a moment of horror—seconds passing steadily by in regular succession, sinking into nothingness.... ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... Swirling nothingness, a dry cachination as of some dead-as-dust thing laughing at life itself, a shuddering vibrance flooding through my flesh in waves of terrible nausea, a dim glow that grew and grew into terrifying painful brilliance, then paled and died ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... reckoned permissible by conventional morality; but even then her blood flowed as quietly as ever in her fascinatingly graceful, tranquil body. Sometimes coming out of her fragrant bath all warm and enervated, she would fall to musing on the nothingness of life, the sorrow, the labour, the malice of it.... Her soul would be filled with sudden daring, and would flow with generous ardour, but a draught would blow from a half-closed window, and Anna Sergyevna would shrink ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... realized where he was. Manning had picked him up and thrown him far into space ... out into that waste where for hundreds of light years there was only the awful nothingness of space. ...
— Empire • Clifford Donald Simak
... the mixing of sun and shadow in the spaces of the air. Ishmael's keen eyes could see how a spider's thread, woven from one tall plant to another, and wavering ever so delicately in the faint breeze, was one moment lit here and there to a line of pure light that merged into nothingness and gleamed out again, while a moment later it might have vanished entirely or else shine its length. The midges, dancing in mid-air, were living sun-motes for one flash, then were swallowed up as suddenly as though they had slipped through ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... great scheme. I am not as sanguine as some of your admirers are as to the success you are sure to win; but I look upon it as a forlorn hope, in which a man had better lose his life than save it by ignoble do-nothingness." ...
— Darkest India - A Supplement to General Booth's "In Darkest England, and the Way Out" • Commissioner Booth-Tucker
... moving; it seemed, rather, that we alone were still, while over us and around us the spirits of the night flew past. I felt the wind of unseen wings lifting my hair; I heard the splash and gurgle of strange creatures swimming by. With my hands close locked on Barbara's arm, and wide eyes staring into nothingness, I waited for some human sound to break the ...
— Margaret Tudor - A Romance of Old St. Augustine • Annie T. Colcock
... than this was her formulated philosophy—the commonplace creed of a commonplace woman in a rather less than commonplace family hotel. The important thing was not the form of it, but her resolve not to sink into nothingness.... She hoped that some day she would get a job again. She sometimes borrowed a typewriter from the manager of the hotel, and she took down in shorthand the miscellaneous sermons—by Baptists, Catholics, Reformed rabbis, Christian Scientists, theosophists, High Church Episcopalians, Hindu ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... before her marriage, Jeanne passed calmly and peacefully, as if she were almost exhausted by the number of pleasant hours she had lately had. The morning of the eventful day she had no time to think; she was only conscious of a great sense of nothingness within her, as if beneath her skin, her flesh, and blood, and bones had vanished, and she noticed how her fingers trembled when ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... hath shown me beauty's nothingness And taught me e'en your cruelty to bless, That cruelty which banished me the place Where I, at least, had gazed upon your face. And when no more I saw your beauty beam The harsher yet your cruelty did seem; Yet in obedience failed I not, ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. III. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... her car seemed to sail out into nothingness like some weird aerial monster, the headlights streaming uncannily through ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... face, In the depths of Wei, carp and grayling swim. Idly I come with my bamboo fishing-rod And hang my hook by the banks of Wei stream. A gentle wind blows on my fishing-gear Softly shaking my ten feet of line. Though my body sits waiting for fish to come, My heart has wandered to the Land of Nothingness.[1] Long ago a white-headed man[2] Also fished at the same river's side; A hooker of men, not a hooker of fish, At seventy years, he caught Wen1 Wang.[2] But I, when I come to cast my hook in the stream, Have no thought either of fish or men. Lacking the skill to capture ...
— More Translations from the Chinese • Various
... column of vapor was broken into a number of sections, as may be said, so that when viewed from a distance the figure was that of a black broad band of enormous height, separated by belts of colorless air into a dozen pieces or divisions, the upper ones gradually melting into nothingness. Besides this, so deftly had the red men manipulated the fire and blanket, that these divisions showed a peculiar wavy appearance, which would have excited wondering remark, no ...
— Camp-fire and Wigwam • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... of Charlemagne, devoted their entire lives to repeated and furious civil wars, in which the empire fell apart, the flower of the Frankish race perished, and the strength of its dominion was sapped to nothingness.[1] ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... recess of the chamber—drew aside a curtain, that veiled a crucifix and a small table, on which lay a Bible and the monastic emblems of the skull and crossbones—emblems, indeed, grave and irresistible, of the nothingness of power, and the uncertainty of life. Before these sacred monitors, whether to humble or to elevate, knelt that proud and aspiring man; and when he rose, it was with a lighter step and more cheerful mien than he ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... longer saw the fine, pale face; he could distinguish only the flash of her eyes, surrounded by white mist, as one sees the splendor of the sun on a stormy morning. His temples throbbed cruelly, his sight grew turbid. The sweet stupor, soft and empty as nothingness, was succeeded by a sleep peopled with incoherent visions, of fiery images vibrating against a background of intense blackness, by torture which wrung from his breast groans of fear and cries of anguish. He was delirious. ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... intuition, which cannot be sensuously confirmed,— it is little wonder if man has inclined to the persuasion that what is highest in him is but an attribute of what is lowest, and that when the body dies, the soul must follow it into nothingness. ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... their political liberty, and the rights of the ballot? Was not the land dedicated to toleration and charity in religion? Was the work of Washington and Jefferson and Hamilton to go down in ruin and nothingness? While the old world, with her tyrannies, scoffed at the failure of the Republic, men thought of Bunker Hill and Valley Forge and Yorktown. They thought of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. They recalled the tribute of one of the greatest of English ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... desired to see become petty monarchs each in his own territory. There seems no doubt that words were used with singular disregard of their meaning. It is surprising that time was wasted in concocting elaborate phrases that dropped into nothingness at the slightest touch. In citing the above passage from Commines referring to the treaty, the close of the negotiations has been anticipated. Whether or not any draft of a treaty received the duke's signature, the king's ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam |
