"Out of nothing" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... be fought on English soil also, and indeed is hardly over yet. For the renewed outbreak of the old quarrel between Classical and Romantic grew out of nothing more than an attempt of the modern spirit to free itself from laws of taste laid down by the Grand Siecle. But we must not forget the debt which all modern prose literature owes to France. It ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... substance, in one glory and kingdom undivided. He then is in three persons one God, without beginning, and without end, eternal and everlasting, increate, immutable and incorporeal, invisible, infinite, incomprehensible, alone good and righteous, who created all things out of nothing, whether visible or invisible. First, he made the heavenly and invisible powers, countless multitudes, immaterial and bodiless, ministering spirits of the majesty of God. Afterward he created this visible world, heaven and earth and sea, which also he made glorious with light and richly adorned ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... quite plain, does it not? But do you know there was once a boy, who did not believe that he could not create things until he had tried to make something out of nothing, and found that only nothing came. He was quite sure he could create anything if he only told it to come; so at last his teacher said, ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... or of any created existence which has life in se. God alone has life in Himself. All things else are only forms and receptacles of life, sheerly phenomenal, except so far forth as He is their substance. The notion of Creation as something made out of nothing, having life afterwards in se, and so holding an external relation to Deity, falsifies all the theologies, and degrades them into mere natural religions." It is the mother-fallacy," says Mr. James, "which breeds all these petty fallacies in the popular ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Gibson (The Cid Ballads, etc., 1887, II, 144), and there is also a version attributed to Dryden. page 260 13.—Lope Felix de Vega Carpio (1562-1635) was the most fertile playwright ever known to the world. Alone he created the Spanish drama almost out of nothing. Born at Madrid, where he spent most of his life, Lope was an infant prodigy who fulfilled the promise of his youth. His first play was written at the age of thirteen. He fought against the Portuguese in the expedition of 1583 and took part in ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... position of senior major-general was a difficult one. To knit into an army such a mass of units, to create supplies out of nothing, to organize a commissary and means of communication, and maintain a firm front over a line of ten miles, these were the needs of the situation. We need scarcely marvel that Ward, old and enfeebled, with his hands tied by uncertain authority, could not meet them. A genius ...
— The Siege of Boston • Allen French
... heard, half divined. And now and then a form, usually unknown, almost always smiling and friendly, visible for a few moments—the space of a fire-fly's incandescence—then fading—entering her orbit out of nothing and, going into nothing, out ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... the divine rule that the cross and affliction should precede consolation. God never comforts any but the afflicted, just as he never quickens unto life any but the dead, nor ever justifies any but sinners! He always creates all things out of nothing. ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... like God, man cannot see it in its holy of holies and live. And it is, like God, increate, springing out of nothing, yet the maker of all things—ever changing yet the same ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... a mystery, and particularly that of man. At the blast of His mouth were the rest of the creatures made, and at His bare word they started out of nothing: but in the frame of man (as the text describes it) he played the sensible operator, and seemed not so much to create, as make him. When he had separated the materials of other creatures, there consequently ...
— Sir Thomas Browne and his 'Religio Medici' - an Appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... The Disagreeable Man was scarcely himself to-day; or was it that he was more like himself? He seemed in a boyish mood; he made fun out of nothing, and laughed with such young fresh laughter, that even August, the grave blue-spectacled driver, was moved to mirth. As for Bernardine, she had to look at Robert Allitsen several times to be sure that he was the same Robert Allitsen she had known two ...
— Ships That Pass In The Night • Beatrice Harraden
... he boldly advanced his blasphemies in his sermons, affirming, with Ebion, Artemas, and Theodotus, that Christ was not truly God; adding, what no heretic had before asserted in such a manner, that the Son was a creature, and made out of nothing; that there was a time when he did not exist, and that he was capable of sinning, with other such impieties. St. Athanasius informs us,[2] that he also held that Christ had no other soul than his created divinity, or spiritual substance, made before the world: consequently, ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... curtains in giving an air of grace and elegance to a room is astonishing. White curtains really create a room out of nothing. No matter how coarse the muslin, so it be white and hang in graceful folds, there is a charm in it that supplies the want ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... foundries and rolling-mills, springing up on every hand. They saw the great truth that the internal resources of the South developed with amazing rapidity; that arms were manufactured and supplies of vital need created, as it were out of nothing; but they missed the true reason for that abnormal development, which was the dire stress from isolation. They rejoiced to very elation at a popular effort, spontaneous—unanimous—supreme! But they realized little that it was ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... imagination, and so affect his body, that it may assume a nature contrary to its former one, and whereof the idea cannot exist in the mind (III:x.) But that a man, from the necessity of his own nature, should endeavour to become non-existent, is as impossible as that something should be made out of nothing, as everyone will see for ...
— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza
... young man did go. He climbed aboard the stranded craft—a forlorn picture she made, lying on her side in the mud—and was surprised to find how much had been manufactured "out of nothing." Her seams, those which the sun had opened, were caulked neatly; her deck was clean and white; she was partially rigged, with new and old canvas and ropes; and to his landsman's eyes she looked ...
— The Woman-Haters • Joseph C. Lincoln
... true that she had not exhibited it in any other way before—quite to the contrary—but nevertheless he saw strong evidences of it now, and it made him very bitter in his feeling toward her. How could she be guilty of any such conduct toward him? Had he not picked her up out of nothing, so to speak, and ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... and the League, than by his own armies; and it was this dependence on equivocal allies, which he was endeavoring to escape, by the appointment of a general of his own. But what possibility was there of raising an army out of nothing, without the all-powerful aid of gold and the inspiriting name of a victorious commander; above all, an army which, by its discipline, warlike spirit, and activity, should be fit to cope with the experienced troops of the northern conqueror? In all ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... brain and hands, wrote matter for the Blade, managed its mechanical details, and at the same time spent time, labor, and money in enlarging the capabilities of the office and building up a valuable job-printing business. In fourteen years he built up out of nothing, or next to nothing, a newspaper with a profitable circulation and a wide reputation, a job office admitted to be one of the most complete in the State, having five presses and material abundant in quantity ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... some compendium of these images); chance intervenes in the flux, but evolution is due to an absolute Effort which exists in vacuo and is simplicity itself; and this Effort, without having an idea of what it pursues, nevertheless produces it out of nothing. ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... to Him. You are His. He made you out of nothing. He loved you as only a God can love. His arms are open to receive you even though you have sinned against Him. Come to Him, poor sinner, poor vain and erring sinner. Now is the acceptable time. ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... to anticipitate in war the resources of peace, and although the other nations of Europe have tried and trodden every path of force or folly in fruitless quest of the same object, yet we still expect to find, in juggling tricks and banking dreams, that money can be made out of nothing, and in sufficient quantity to meet the expenses of a heavy war by sea and land. It is said, indeed, that money cannot be borrowed from our merchants as from those of England. But it can be borrowed from our ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... Jane; "I have my man in the boat to watch through the window. What a singular being he is! I think he spends hours in that boat, and what he does I can't conceive. There it is, quietly anchored, and there is he in it. I never saw anybody but myself who could get up so much industry out of nothing. He has all his housework there, a broom and a duster, and I dare say he has a cooking-stove and a gridiron. He sits a little while, then he stoops down, then he goes to the other end. Sometimes he goes ashore ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... some only of misfortune; some innocently and unknowingly, and whom we never properly hurt. Some, also, by our mere existence; some by our best actions; some because we have helped and not hurt others; and some out of nothing else but the pure original devilry of their own evil hearts. And then, when we take all these men home to our hearts, what hearts all these men give us! Who, then, is the man here who has done to ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... unspeakably; and the thought of his serfdom ceased to weigh upon him from the hour of his marriage. As through magic the little dwelling had become transformed: its misery was masked with charming paper devices,—with dainty decorations created out of nothing by that pretty jugglery of which ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn
... university came out of nothing!—nothing but the need of a young man and the fact that he told the need to one who, throughout his life, has felt the impulse to help any one in need and has always ...
— Acres of Diamonds • Russell H. Conwell
... and common-sense transform a large group of able-bodied men accustomed to healthy exercise into a serviceable and even a victorious army, but we made a great mistake. The commissariat and sanitary service and especially the military train-corps would have to be created out of nothing. When in June the governor of one State reported that his infantry regiment was formed and only waiting for rifles, uniforms and the necessary military wagons, and when another declared that his two regiments of cavalry and six batteries were ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
... thinking of Jew and Mohammedan but really transformed it from religious and ethical discussions into metaphysical systems. In the Bible and similarly in the Koran we have a purely personal view of God and the world. God is a person, he creates the world—out of nothing to be sure—but nevertheless he is thought of doing it in the manner in which a person does such things with a will and a purpose in time and place. He puts a soul into man and communicates to him laws and prohibitions. Man must obey these laws because ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... to repine? Even a cook must sometimes be excused, since he was not God to create something out of nothing. Peradventure, the timely indisposition of the babe within the tent would offer distraction. In the interludes of stirring the pots and declaiming against fate and the misdemeanours of the masalchi, the cook soothed his ruffled ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... in a nebulous condition or not. So enchanting is their theory, that many profess to believe that not only were all species of animals and plants evolved from a single germ, but that even matter itself was evolved out of nothing. This theory of evolution as wide as the universe, as ponderous as the stars, is supported only by the weak ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... is a mystery and particularly that of man. At the blast of His mouth were the rest of the creatures made, and at His bare word they started out of nothing. But in the frame of man He played the sensible operator, and seemed not so much to create as to make him. When He had separated the materials of other creatures, there consequently resulted a form and soul: but having raised the walls of man, He was driven to a second and harder creation—of ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... quoderat demonstrandum is still to be proved. What does he mean by we? If we were nothing before birth, that is, if we never had been at all, what would that be that is born? Being born does not mean becoming something out of nothing. What is born or produced was there, before it was born or produced, before it came into the light of the world. All creation out of nothing is a pure chimera for us. Have we ever the feeling or experience that we had a beginning here on earth, or have we entirely forgotten ...
— The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour • Friedrich Max Mueller
... continued to come to him regularly, and each one contained some important clue, which, followed up, invariably led to evidence of value. Slowly, surely, out of nothing as it were, the chain was forged. Now came the names of persons who had seen or had talked with some of the accused upon the fatal day, now a hint which turned light upon some dark spot in their records. Again the letters aided ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... were pleased with this, and went continually to see him competing and displaying himself in these exercises; but the better sort that saw him, pitied the cupidity and ambition that made one who had risen from utter poverty to extreme wealth, and out of nothing into greatness, unwilling to admit any limit to his high fortune, or to be content with being admired, and quietly enjoying what he had already got: why, as if he still were indigent, should he at so great an age leave his glory and his triumphs ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... Sabbath is essential to the faith; for such only as observe the Sabbath confess that the earth will be renewed: because He who created it out of nothing will renew it."—David Kimchi, on Isa. 55:5, ...
— A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse • Sylvester Bliss
... of their goodness and wisdom. To expect that men who do not honorably and intelligently conduct their private affairs will honorably and intelligently conduct the affairs of the community is to be a fool. We are told that out of nothing God made the Heavens and the earth; but out of nothing God never did and man never can, make a public sense of honor and a public conscience. Miracles are now performed but one day of the year—the twenty-ninth of February; and on leap ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... careers and the intimate side of their exceptional lives is of decided interest to us. This I think is especially true where the noted ones are among our public entertainers, the player-folk, who bring so much joy and happiness into the world out of nothing—creators of innocent pleasure. ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... to go to hide away from his scheming mother and his argus-eyed minister. The genius of Colbert was severely taxed to supply the means for Louis' magnificent tastes and for his foreign wars, at the same time. Even Colbert could not create money out of nothing. The burden must rest somewhere, and just as surely must ultimately be ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... wish I could get so much fun out of nothing as you seem able to," said the brakeman, who was particularly down on tramps. "I reckon the super'll give you something to laugh about directly that won't seem ...
— Cab and Caboose - The Story of a Railroad Boy • Kirk Munroe
... referred to as the one "who made The Ladies' Home Journal out of nothing," who "built it from the ground up," or, in similar terms, implying that when he became its editor in 1889 the magazine was practically non-existent. This is far from the fact. The magazine was begun in 1883, and had been edited ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... accidental form of the soul itself."(988) Agreeable to this conception is the further Thomistic teaching that sanctifying grace is not directly created by God, but drawn (educta) from the potentia obedientialis of the soul.(989) Not even the Scotists, though they held grace to be created out of nothing(990) claimed that it was ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... believe it to be. For we are bound in reason to be assured of many things of which we can form no conception. Reason compels us to be assured of the reality of space, of eternity, of the creation of the universe out of nothing, and, perhaps we may add, of the being of GOD; the being of GOD, I mean, considered apart from His nature and attributes. Yet we cannot form any intelligent conception of these realities. We cannot shape ...
— The Life of the Waiting Soul - in the Intermediate State • R. E. Sanderson
... a few masterly sketches, vaguely tinted in Indian ink, drawn upon strips of gray paper most accurately cut but without the slightest attempt at a frame. This is all: not a seat, not a cushion, not a scrap of furniture. It is the very acme of studied simplicity, of elegance made out of nothing, of the most immaculate and incredible cleanliness. And while following the bonzes through this long suite of empty halls, we are struck by their contrast with the overflow of knickknacks scattered about our rooms in France, and we take a sudden dislike to the profusion and ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... and ceremonies that prevailed in the time of Confucius, (and before that period all seems to be fable and uncertainty) may be pretty nearly ascertained from the writings that are ascribed to that philosopher. He maintains in his physics, that "out of nothing there cannot possibly be produced any thing;—that material bodies must have existed from all eternity;—that the cause (lee, reason) or principle of things, must have had a co-existence with the things themselves;—that, therefore, this cause is also eternal, ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... gorgeous momentary blaze of sunset colours in the west; the rustle of the wind through the short twilight when the west is a pure pale green and the east the darkest blue; and the downward swoop of the planets out of nothing to the earth. The inheritor of the other places dreamed himself back into his inheritance as he tramped to and fro, forgetful of his blindness and parched with desire as with a fever—until unexpectedly he heard the blackbirds ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... of an army springing up out of nothing, the spectacle of the monumental work of military organization being pushed on to success in spite of mistakes, arrested the attention of ...
— Porto Rico - Its History, Products and Possibilities... • Arthur D. Hall
... many cases less so, than the fine linen it adorns. This is known as Reticella, or "punto in aria." The last name is applicable to all the laces of Venice which succeeded Reticella, and means lace literally made out of nothing or without ...
— Chats on Old Lace and Needlework • Emily Leigh Lowes
... theological age, can really be explained by the struggle for existence. But in trying to make an occasional and partial cause universal and ultimate, it has undertaken the impossible task of bringing the greater out of the less; which really means bringing their difference out of nothing—and this is creation with the First Cause left out; that is, spontaneous creation. It is from first to last an "aggregation" theory, and has to face the insupportable burdens which such a theory brings ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... our philosophers believe this; and yet the writers of this book know of nothing but actual present, and their god—who will no more endure another god as his equal than a citizen's wife will admit a second woman to her husband's house—is said to have created the world out of nothing for no other purpose but to be worshipped and feared by ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... "Made out of nothing. You see the absurdity, for nothing must have first existed. I am glad to see you laugh. Do you think that nothingness could ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... came across traces of the construction of a great road—white new stone embankments that started out of nothing, and went to nowhere, and Mike confessed that he had lost the ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon
... in a word, only bodies (corps) and what concerns them, all that which immediately proceeds from supreme power is incomprehensible to us, as it itself [i.e., supreme power] is to our minds. To create, or to make anything out of nothing, this is an idea we cannot conceive of, for the reason that in all that we can know, we do not find any model which represents it. GOD alone, then, can create, while nature can only produce. We must suppose that, in his ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... the least sentimental, her natural disposition inclining her to be more than cheerful, actually gay. She soon recovered herself, and when, a short time after, she stood, scissors in hand, demonstrating how very easy it was to make something out of nothing, her sisters never suspected how very near tears had lately been to those bright eyes, which were always the ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... become. Place the naturally gifted child of intelligent parents among savages, and he becomes a savage. Whatever a man is, society has made him. Ideas are not creations that spring from the head of the individual out of nothing, or through inspiration from above; they are products of social life, of the Spirit of the Age, raised in the head of the individual. An Aristotle could not possibly have the ideas of a Darwin, and a Darwin could not choose ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... this estate is wife, child, everything, to me. 'Tis like some work of vanity,—a carved image that a man may give his whole life to making, and yet die content if he achieves but some approach to the creation of his soul. I have made this estate out of nothing; it hath grown larger and larger, richer and more rich, in answer to my skill; why should I not love it, and put my whole heart in the accomplishment of my design, with the same devotion that you admire in the ...
— A Set of Rogues • Frank Barrett
... light strong enough to read by. Besides, there was nothing to read. One could only lie and think and think. And I was a lifer, and it seemed certain, if I did not do a miracle, make thirty-five pounds of dynamite out of nothing, that all the years of my life would be spent in ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... the coldness of the water; and the dryness in the fire over the moisture of the air. And thus the alterations are made and produced, out of one another.... As nature cannot create by making something out of nothing, so neither can it annihilate, by turning something into nothing; whence it consequently follows, as there is no access, so there is no diminution in the universe, no more than in the alphabet, by the infinite combination and transposition of letters, or in the wax by the alteration ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... as men, can find or make a party question, and quarrel out of any thing or out of nothing. There was a Scotch pedlar, who used to come every Thursday evening to our school to supply our various wants and fancies. The Scotch pedlar died, and two candidates offered to supply his place, an English lad of the name of Dutton, and a Jew ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... are thus the two elements which enter into the one Absolute Idea as contradictories, and both together combine to form a complete notion of bare production, or the becoming of something out of nothing,—the unfolding of real existence in its lowest ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... find something which we can grasp. The public generally have an idea that a detective can make something out of nothing that the merest film of a clew is all that is necessary with which to build up a strong substantial edifice of facts. It is only the Messieurs La Coqs and 'Old Sleuths' of books and illustrated weeklies that are possessed with the second sight, and can hunt down the shrewdest criminals, without ...
— Jim Cummings • Frank Pinkerton
... nature or art, however seemingly barren and commonplace, endlessly alive with possibilities of joyful discovery—with possibilities, even, of a developing imagination. For the Auto-Comrade, your better self, is a magician. He can get something out of nothing. ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... dimly perceived how vastly differed her homely suit and unstudied contour—painfully unstudied to fastidious eyes—from Ethelberta's well-arranged draperies, even from Picotee's clever bits of ribbon, by which she made herself look pretty out of nothing at all. Yet this negligence was his sister's essence; without it she would have been a spoilt product. She had no outer world, and her rusty black was as appropriate to Faith's unseen courses as were Ethelberta's correct lights and shades to her ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... heavier pains and penalties fall upon those who would elude the tasks which are put upon them by the great Master Workman of the world, who, in his dealings with his creatures, sympathizes with their weakness, and speaking of a creation wrought by mere will out of nothing, speaks of six days of LABOUR and one of REST. I do not call a healthy young man, cheerful in his mind, and vigorous in his arms, I cannot call such a man POOR; I cannot pity my kind as a kind, merely because they are men. This affected pity only tends to dissatisfy them with ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... differs from the Father; if you ask the price of a loaf, you are told in reply that the Son is inferior to the Father; if you inquire whether the bath is ready, the answer is that the Son was made out of nothing." The subtle questions pertaining to the Trinity were the theme of universal conversation, even amid the calamities of ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... to be expected. Undisturbed by the sensation he knew he was creating among his employes, he moved about, accompanied by his manager, making last suggestions, giving final instructions, and radiating fond, farewell glances at all the loved details of the business he had built out of nothing. ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... Thomas needn't think he's the only one in the party who can get a meal out of nothing," answered Ned proudly, starting off to gather ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in the Rockies • Frank Gee Patchin
... wonderful than what we do and can. I mean One who is sovereign over His own will and actions, though always according to the eternal Rule of right and wrong, which is Himself. I mean, moreover, that He created all things out of nothing, and preserves them every moment, and could destroy them as easily as He made them; and that, in consequence, He is separated from them by an abyss, and is incommunicable in all His attributes. And further, He has stamped upon all things, in the hour of their ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... the supply of our needs, if God our Saviour was the one thought of our hearts, then it might be unnecessary that we should ask for anything we need. But seeing we take our supplies as a matter of course, feeling as if they came out of nothing, or from the earth, or our own thoughts, instead of out of a heart of love and a will which alone is force, it is needful that we should be made feel some at least of our wants, that we may seek him who alone supplies all of them, and find his every gift a window to his ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... when we've nothing else to do. But why do we do it?—is it to prevent ourselves from seeing to the bottom of things" (he stopped by a stream and began stirring it with his walking-stick and clouding the water with mud), "making cities and mountains and whole universes out of nothing, or do we really love each other, or do we, on the other hand, live in a state of perpetual uncertainty, knowing nothing, leaping from moment to moment as from world to world?—which is, on the whole, the view ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... whom you consider inconceivable to the human mind? You are the blasphemers, when you imagine that a being, perfect according to you, could be guilty of such cruelty towards creatures whom he has made out of nothing. Confess, your ignorance of a creating God; and cease meddling with mysteries, which are repugnant to ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... country treating my brother so badly—well, then, let things go on as they are.' But it was the pretension to a part in the name of Ormont which so violently offended the democratic aristocrat, and caused her to resent it as an assault on the family honour, by 'a woman springing up out of nothing'—a woman ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... rarely disconcerted, and his self-reliance was most probably one chief cause of his success. He was a man who performed the daily miracle of creating everything for himself out of nothing. His father had barely been considered a member of the lower nobility, although he always called himself "dei conti del Ferice"—of the family of the counts of his name; but where or when the Conti del Ferice had lived, was a question he never was able to answer satisfactorily. ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... puzzled. I would have mentioned it before, only it seemed to be making a mountain out of nothing." ...
— The Pit Prop Syndicate • Freeman Wills Crofts
... land who loved the memory of Chaka, and remembered that Dingaan had murdered him and Umhlangana also. For now that Chaka was dead, people forgot how evilly he had dealt with them, and remembered only that he was a great man, who had made the Zulu people out of nothing, as a smith fashions a bright spear from a lump of iron. Also, though they had changed masters, yet their burden was not lessened, for, as Chaka slew, so Dingaan slew also, and as Chaka oppressed, so did Dingaan oppress. Therefore Dingaan yielded to the voice of his indunas and no impi was sent ...
— Nada the Lily • H. Rider Haggard
... fancy, by heightening every danger; representing the English and Dutch captains to be men incapable of hearing reason, or distinguishing between honest men and rogues; or between a story calculated for our own turn, made out of nothing, on purpose to deceive, and a true genuine account of our whole voyage, progress, and design; for we might many ways have convinced any reasonable creature that we were not pirates; the goods we had on board, the course we steered, our frankly shewing ourselves, ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe
... rule of faith . . . is that whereby it is believed that there is in any wise but one God, who by His own Word first of all sent forth, brought all things out of nothing; that this Word called His Son, was . . . brought down at last by the Spirit and the power of God the Father into the Virgin Mary, made flesh in her womb, and ...
— The Virgin-Birth of Our Lord - A paper read (in substance) before the confraternity of the Holy - Trinity at Cambridge • B. W. Randolph
... entertainments. But Patty knew this would mostly redound to Mona's benefit. She would be asked on Patty's account to places where otherwise she would not have been invited. And Patty well knew SHE would be left out of nothing just ...
— Patty's Butterfly Days • Carolyn Wells
... said impatiently, "translate it, won't you? You and Max Fortin make a lot of mystery out of nothing, ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... are not first causes. They do not evolve conduct out of nothing. The child does this, the man does that, because of something; because of many things. If we do not like the way people behave, and wish them to behave better, we should, if we are rational beings, study the ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... vivid recollection of their tastes; and added deliciously substantial though delicate sandwiches, with plenty of the fruitiest and nuttiest kinds of little cakes. She had donned the one real afternoon frock she possessed, a clever make-over out of nothing in particular. Altogether, when she greeted her guests, as they ran, fur-clad and silk-stockinged after the manner of their kind, into her welcoming arms, she had seemed to ...
— Under the Country Sky • Grace S. Richmond
... gain more than they lose in the mechanical transformation. One is never tired of painting, because you have to set down not what you knew already, but what you have just discovered. In the former case you translate feelings into words; in the latter, names into things. There is a continual creation out of nothing going on. With every stroke of the brush a new field of inquiry is laid open; new difficulties arise, and new triumphs are prepared over them. By comparing the imitation with the original, you see what you have done, and how much ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... tongues, as from some hundred-headed monster, shot out incessantly, and licking the air a moment, were gone forever. Occasionally this thick, cloudy veil concealed all but the spars of the enemy from sight, and then the tall masts seemed rising, by some potent spell, out of nothing; occasionally the terrific explosions would rend and tear asunder the curtain, and, for an instant, the black hulls would loom out threateningly, and then disappear. The roar of three hundred guns shook the island and fort unremittingly: ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... to whether it is desirable to call selection a creative process. There are so many supernatural and mystical implications that hang around the term creative that one can not be too careful in stating in what sense the term is to be used. If by creative is meant that something is made out of nothing, then of course there is no need for the scientist to try to answer such a question. But if by a creative process is meant that something is made out of something else, then there are two alternatives ...
— A Critique of the Theory of Evolution • Thomas Hunt Morgan
... imagination took place of intellect. Tell a being, whose affections and passions have been more exercised than his reason, that God said, Let there be light! and there was light; and he would prostrate himself before the Being who could thus call things out of nothing, as if they were: but a man in whom reason had taken place of passion, would not adore, till wisdom was conspicuous as well as power, for his admiration must be founded ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... paper money always involves. The state whose financial distress introduced the evil, sees a great portion of its revenues melt away before its eyes;(930) while in what concerns its outlay, nothing is more calculated to mislead it than such an imagined creation out of nothing. And a thing which greatly contributes to this its the frightful sensitiveness of a depreciated paper currency in the presence of complications of foreign politics, a quality which may cause the government as many inconveniences from without as the issue of its paper money produced conveniences ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... Clayton ever got hold of him, when the chap hadn't a halfpenny to fly with, but was a most ordacious fellow at speculating and inventions, and was always up to something new. One day he had a plan for making moist sugar out of bricks—then soap out of nothing—and sweet oil out of stones. At last Clayton hears of him, and hooks him up, gets him to the chapel; first converts him, and then goes partners with him in the spekylations—let's him have as much money as he asks for, and because soap doesn't come from nothing, and sugar from ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... unedifying, because of what may be called "the uncreative instinct," that safeguard and concomitant of a civilisation which demands of us complete efficiency, practical and thorough employment of every second of our time and every inch of our space? We know, of course, that out of nothing nothing can be made, that to "create" anything a man must first receive impressions, and that to receive impressions requires an apparatus of nerves and feelers, exposed and quivering to every vibration round ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... seventy years of unwearyable apostolate, was one of the purest and most popular heroes of modern Christianity. He was not content to preach the Gospel only from the parchment—a mystic and a poet, yet a practical man of forethought, he was able, out of nothing, to create a Society of militant propagandists for the social redemption of the lost crowds, and to fight against idleness, alcoholism, ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... thing is it that thou, who art dust and nothingness, yieldest thyself to man for God's sake, when I, the Almighty and the Most High, who created all things out of nothing, subjected Myself to man for thy sake? I became the most humble and despised of men, that by My humility thou mightest overcome thy pride. Learn to obey, O dust! Learn to humble thyself, O earth and clay, and to bow thyself beneath the feet of all. Learn to crush ...
— The Imitation of Christ • Thomas a Kempis
... business for me. My imagination began to construct dangers out of nothing, and they multiplied faster than I could keep the run of them. All at once I imagined I saw shoal water ahead! The wave of coward agony that surged through me then came near dislocating every joint in me. All my confidence in that crossing vanished. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Bible does not tell us. Whether he created (as doubtless he could have done if he chose) this world suddenly out of nothing, full grown and complete; or whether he created it (as he creates you and me, and all living and growing things now) out of things which had been before it—that the Bible does not ...
— The Gospel of the Pentateuch • Charles Kingsley
... man who went about that mill, often saying, "I hain't got no book l'arnin' like the rest of you." He was the man who owned the mill. He had made it with his own genius out of nothing. He had become rich and honored. Every man in the mill loved him ...
— The University of Hard Knocks • Ralph Parlette
... commonplace, shallow fashionable talk about hereditary genius—I don't mean, of course, the talk of our Darwins and Galtons, but the cheap drawing-room philosophy of easy sciolists who can't understand them—is itself fully as absurd in its own way as the idea that something can come out of nothing. For it is no explanation of the existence of genius to say that it is hereditary. You only put the difficulty one place back. Granting that young Alastor Jones is a budding poet because his father, Percy Bysshe Jones, was a poet before him, why, pray, ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... quite clearly angry, as well he might be, after the things he'd heard, but he was entirely cold and collected. Gordon was hot, and bursting with imaginary wrongs. I was aghast at this perfectly foolish and unnecessary muddle that had suddenly arisen out of nothing. Sandy apologized to me with unimpeachable politeness for inadvertently overhearing, and then turned to Gordon and stiffly invited him to get into his car ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster
... and the Royal Flying Corps. His previous history. Given command of the Military Wing at Farnborough, to make something out of nothing. Helped by Major Brancker, who is appointed Deputy Director of Military Aeronautics. Previous history of Major Brancker. His flight as observer during cavalry manoeuvres in India, 1911. Returns to England, learns to fly, ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... people in Argentina would have to make payments to England and would come to it and ask it for drafts on London, which, by remitting this bill to be sold in London, it would be able to supply. International finance is so often regarded as a machinery by which paper wealth is manufactured out of nothing, that it is very important to remember that all this paper wealth only acquires value by being ultimately based on something that is grown or made and wanted to keep people alive or comfortable, or at ...
— International Finance • Hartley Withers
... are not compact. But if perhaps they think, in other wise, Fires through their combinations can be quenched And change their substance, very well: behold, If fire shall spare to do so in no part, Then heat will perish utterly and all, And out of nothing would the world be formed. For change in anything from out its bounds Means instant death of that which was before; And thus a somewhat must persist unharmed Amid the world, lest all return to naught, And, born from naught, abundance thrive anew. Now since ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... alone: they were their own prisoners, secure from the street and from all interruption. Hilda, once more and in a higher degree, realized the miraculous human power to make experience out of nothing. They had nothing but themselves, and they could, if they chose, create all their ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... exhalation of particles of moisture from the ocean, the evolution of numbers out of an original unity, these are among the illustrations by which an exhaustless ingenuity has supported the notion of the emanation of souls from God. That "something cannot come out of nothing" is an axiom resting on the ground of our rational instincts. And seeing all things within our comprehension held in the chain of causes and effects, one thing always evolving from another, we leap to the conclusion that ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... make a kitchenmaid out of nothing," said Mr. Linton gloomily. "I hope to hear of one in a day or two; I have written ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce
... at Andover, in 1810, the eager enthusiasm of Moses Stuart made him the father of exegetical science not only for America, but for all the English-speaking countries. His not less eminent pupil and associate, Edward Robinson, later of the Union Seminary, New York, created out of nothing the study of biblical geography. Associating with himself the most accomplished living Arabist, Eli Smith, of the American mission at Beirut, he made those "Biblical Researches in Palestine" which have been the foundation on which ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... thoughts more abstract than they possess. But that their thought can be abstract is proved, even in the case of the absolutely 'primitive Arunta,' by their myth of the Ungambikula, 'a word which means "out of nothing," or "self-existing,"' say Messrs. Spencer and Gillen.[6] Once more, I find that I have spoken of some savage Beings as 'omnipresent' and 'omnipotent.' But I have pointed out that this is only a modern metaphysical rendering of the actual words attributed to the ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... symbolical. So far as I could gather it had never been here before—at any rate no one could be found who had seen it here or in the neighbourhood, and it seemed obvious that its sudden emergence, as it were, out of nothing must have ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, April 5, 1916 • Various
... to the left of it. At last, at last, their goal was in sight; and incontinently they flung themselves down, gasping, upon the iron-hard rock, and gazed entranced upon the glorious vision—thrice glorious to them after all that they had suffered—until another great snow-cloud evolved itself out of nothing and swooped down upon them in a final effort ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... "I don't believe you understand what I mean. If you would pay a little closer attention when I am explaining things you would understand better. A tariff doesn't make money out of nothing. How could we save a hundred thousand dollars out of my salary, when the whole salary is only twenty-five hundred dollars a year, and we ...
— The Cheerful Smugglers • Ellis Parker Butler
... thou didst ever make tragedies out of nothing," said Hyacinth, struggling to disguise hysterical tears with airy laughter. "But I am right glad all the same that you are come; for this gentleman has put a scurvy trick upon me, and brought me here on pretence of a gay assembly that ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... training in military affairs. He did not represent the will of his country, for his country had no will. His country really did not exist. Bolivar created it. He was obeying no commands but those of his conscience. He was making something out of nothing, and in his campaigns it was the flash of genius which led him ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... noires manquent de vessie.' But since I put it as I do, 'Black ladders lack bladders,' it becomes, for all its self-evidence, significant, unforgettable, moving. The creation by word-power of something out of nothing—what is that but magic? And, I may add, what is that but literature? Half the world's greatest poetry is simply 'Les echelles noires manquent de vessie,' translated into magic significance as, 'Black ladders lack bladders.' And you can't appreciate ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... from a common divine substance, working everywhere in nature. But this brief story lets at rest all this inquiry. It informs us that matter was not eternal nor did it come into existence by chance, but it was created out of nothing by our eternal God. The story incidentally sets forth the majesty and glory of God and man's dependence upon and his obligation to God. It also explains the origin of sin and of all man's ...
— The Bible Period by Period - A Manual for the Study of the Bible by Periods • Josiah Blake Tidwell
... space, as having for us the value of reality. Nor shall we, if we are to escape scepticism, be willing to admit that these appearances have no sure relation to ultimate reality. We must not try to uncreate the world in order to find God. We were created out of nothing, but we cannot return to nothing, to find our Creator there. The still, small voice is best listened for amid the discordant harmony of ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... I am a spirit formed of flaming light; I saw the monstrous worlds arise out of nothing: thou art of dust, and of yesterday. Do ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... these works preceding Mr. Fiske's historical writings did not come out of nothing. His mental acquirements as a young man and boy were very extraordinary, and give to the last stage of his career at which we shall look—the earliest—perhaps the greatest interest of all. A description of it without a knowledge of what followed would be all ...
— The War of Independence • John Fiske
... therefore, we may relegate the original starting-point, we cannot avoid the conclusion that, at that point, spirit contains the primary substance in itself, which brings us back to the common statement that it made everything out of nothing. We thus find two factors to the making of all things, Spirit and—Nothing; and the addition of Nothing to Spirit leaves only spirit: ...
— The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... to be built and apparatus transplanted, the supply of oil must be maintained and the men fed, in the same inaccessible and distant scenes, a whole service with its routine ... had to be called out of nothing; and a new trade (that of light-keeper) to be taught, ...
— The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls • Jacqueline M. Overton
... Self-same, and the Self-same, and the Self-same, Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty, didst in the Beginning, which is of Thee, in Thy Wisdom, which was born of Thine own Substance, create something, and that out of nothing. For Thou createdst heaven and earth; not out of Thyself, for so should they have been equal to Thine Only Begotten Son, and thereby to Thee also; whereas no way were it right that aught should be equal to Thee, which was ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... truth about God. In spite of the queer words it was very simple. Much simpler than the Trinity. God was not three incomprehensible Persons rolled into one, not Jesus, not Jehovah, not the Father creating the world in six days out of nothing, and muddling it, and coming down from heaven into it as his own son to make the best of a bad job. He was what you had felt and thought him to be as soon as you could think about him at all. The God of Baruch ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... are rooted in the superearthly and incomprehensible. That is the returning to God which in reality is never concluded on earth but yet leaves behind in the soul a divine home sickness, which never again ceases. But man cannot ignore the creation as the Mystics would. Although created out of nothing, that is, through and out of God, he cannot of his own power resolve himself back into this nothingness. The self-annihilation of which Tauler so often speaks is scarcely better than the sinking ...
— Memories • Max Muller
... Finance" had stayed in his mind. Modernly the name seemed briefly to suggest some one who made a lot of money out of nothing but audacity. Certainly it was not being applied to soldiers or statesmen. This was interesting. If he made a lot of money he could move to the country and have plenty of room for the dog. And it seemed about the only field of adventure left for this peculiar genius. ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... complexion that he is out of order, and that all that rich dinner will do him no good. It was his wife's duty to see that he had something plain to eat, with none of them sauces and fal-lals, instead of playing the fine lady and making troubles out of nothing. I've no ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... of his literary education." But to-day the value of the study of such relations appears in quite a new light. Evolutional philosophy, applied to the study of literature as to everything else, has shown us conclusively that man is not a god who can make something out of nothing, and that every great work of genius must depend even less upon the man of genius himself than upon the labours of those who lived before him. Every great author must draw his thoughts and his knowledge ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... far-fetched notion, which is 'really too bad,' that Simonides uses the Lesbian (?) word, (Greek), because he is addressing a Lesbian. The whole may also be considered as a satire on those who spin pompous theories out of nothing. As in the arguments of the Euthydemus and of the Cratylus, the veil of irony is never withdrawn; and we are left in doubt at last how far in this interpretation of Simonides Socrates is 'fooling,' how far he is ...
— Protagoras • Plato
... gold, or a Scandinavian worker in iron, or an old French worker in thread, could produce indeed beautiful design out of nothing but groups of knots and spirals: but you, when you are rightly educated, may render your knots and spirals infinitely more interesting by making them suggestive of natural forms, and rich in elements of ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... he saw a place for himself. He conceived of life in the city as a great game in which he believed he could play a sterling part. Had he not in Caxton brought something out of nothing, had he not systematised and monopolised the selling of papers, had he not introduced the vending of popcorn and peanuts from baskets to the Saturday night crowds? Already boys went out in his employ, already the totals in the bank book had crept to more than seven hundred dollars. ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... to find out God, although God needs not to pass over it to find man; the gulf between that which calls, and that which is thus called into being; between that which makes in its own image and that which is made in that image. It is better to keep the word creation for that calling out of nothing which is the imagination of God; except it be as an occasional symbolic expression, whose daring is fully recognized, of the likeness of man's work to the work of his maker. The necessary unlikeness between the creator and the created holds ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... already fine, and obviously fine in itself. And this particular quality of interpretation has its value too as criticism. For, while it gives the utmost value to what is implicitly there, there at least in embryo, it cannot create out of nothing; it cannot make insincere work sincere, or fill empty work with meaning which never could have belonged to it. Brahms, at his moments of least vitality, comes into a new vigour of life; but Strauss, ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... contained in the first chapter of Genesis—the only account of Creation which is fitted to solve all difficulties and to meet all objections. "Maker" in this article is used in the sense of Creator, implying that heaven and earth were called into existence out of nothing by the word of Divine power; and by "heaven and earth" are meant all creatures, visible and invisible, that have ...
— Exposition of the Apostles Creed • James Dodds
... fortunes of the weak and disorderly Confederation that in 1784, after three years of herculean struggle with impossibilities, this stout heart and sagacious head could no longer weather the storm. The task of creating wealth out of nothing had become too arduous and too thankless to be endured. Robert Morris resigned his place, and it was taken by a congressional committee of finance, under whose management the disorders ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... perform a miracle, it is necessary to have the faculty of creating new causes capable of producing effects opposed to those which ordinary causes can produce. Can we realize how God can give to men the inconceivable power of creating causes out of nothing? Can it be believed that an unchangeable God can communicate to man the power to change or rectify His plan, a power which, according to His essence, an immutable being can not have himself? Miracles, far from doing much honor ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... show no patterns but those which the prolific Mind has woven, we should not wonder at this necessary correspondence. The Mind having decreed of its own motion, while it sat alone before the creation of the world, that it would take to dreaming mathematically, it evoked out of nothing all formal necessities; and later, when it felt some solicitation to play with things, it imposed those forms upon all its toys, admitting none of any other sort into the nursery. In other words, perception perfected its grammar before perceiving any of its objects, ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... of these, shutting their eyes to the absurdity and unreasonableness of such a theory, believe that human souls are created out of nothing at the time of the birth of their bodies and that they continue to exist throughout eternity either to suffer or to enjoy because of the deeds performed during the short period of their earthly existence. Here the question arises why should a man be held responsible throughout eternity ...
— Reincarnation • Swami Abhedananda
... least Apprehension of a future Reckoning, and at last leaving not only his own Children, but possibly those of other People, by his Means, in starving Circumstances; while a Fellow, whom one would scarce suspect to have a humane Soul, shall perhaps raise a vast Estate out of Nothing, and be the Founder of a Family capable of being very considerable in their Country, and doing many illustrious Services to it. That this Observation is just, Experience has put beyond all Dispute. But though the Fact be so evident and glaring, yet ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele |
