"Meaningless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and satellites of Sol had proven comparatively tractable and those that were suited to man-life were quickly brought under his dominion. But there, of course, he had the advantage of proximity. The time involved in running back and forth to the home planet was meaningless and all Earth's resources could be thrown ...
— Adaptation • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... retained, his Johannes Agricola of 1836, Pictor Ignotus of 1845, and Rudel of 1842. Later criticism, moreover, that even yet assumes to ring the old changes of discrimination against everything but "Men and Women," is made not merely inapplicable by this re-arrangement, but uninformed, a meaningless echo of a borrowed opinion which has had the very ground from ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... "that the Nawab would tell you, though the ass goes to Mecca he becomes not a pilgrim thereby. But Atma Singh, if I mistake not, your own creed does not recognize the rites we are to witness; I ask, then, in my turn, why, since our mission is meaningless, does your choice of a destination lead us to the most distant ...
— Atma - A Romance • Caroline Augusta Frazer
... he talked very well. Charnock had a keen eye for the ridiculous and a pretty wit, and was no longer handicapped by the fear of being dismissed. While the foreman replied with coarse but rather meaningless abuse, Charnock's retorts had a definite aim and hit their mark. He indicated with humorous skill the defects in his antagonist's looks and character, and Festing's gang laughed uproariously, while the borrowed workmen applauded as loudly as they ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... his brow, and his hands were clinched. He was apparently furious with passion, but in reality he was perfectly self-possessed. The best proof that can be given of his coolness is that he was carefully studying M. Fortunat's face, and trying to discover the agent's real intentions under his meaningless words. He had expected to find "his dear extortioner" exasperated by his loss, cursing and swearing, and demanding his money—but not at all. He found him more gentle and calm, colder and more reserved than ever; brimful of resignation indeed, and preaching submission to the ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... loosened his hold on the younger man's shoulder and began hopping forward, and the light threw huge, grotesque, strangely moving shadows on the wall ahead of them. Dick ran after him, crowding on his heels and shouting meaningless hopes. Abruptly they came to a right-angle drift, and then, but a few yards down it, they discovered an upraise, crude and uncared-for, but climbing into the higher darkness, and down this there ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... Miami slave and apparently unhurt. But as I stood over her a line of foam bubbled out of her blue lips. Her eyes were meaningless. I had frightened her into catalepsy, and I ground my teeth at my ill luck, for she could have told me something of the woman. I took my brandy flask and tried to ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... looked at her wonderingly. It was a new experience to hear life reduced to the simple terms Phil used. She seemed to him like a teacher who keeps a dull pupil after class, and, by eliminating all unessential factors, makes clear what an hour before had been only a jumble of meaningless terms in the ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... effective as I imagined, and could not account for it; I was staring [with surprise] when he rolled on the ground, and assuming the appearance of a tennis ball, he flew up to the sky. He ascended so high, that at last he disappeared; a moment after, flashing like lightning, and vociferating some meaningless words in his rage, he descended, and gave me such a kick, that I swooned away, and fell flat on my back, and became as one lifeless. God knows how long I remained ere I came to my senses; but when I opened my eyes I saw that I was lying in such a wilderness, where, except thorns and briars, nothing ...
— Bagh O Bahar, Or Tales of the Four Darweshes • Mir Amman of Dihli
... Death but a tale Told to faces grown pale, Worn and wasted with years— A meaningless thing to ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... 28, 1911:—He remains in same apparent stuporous and catatonic attitude. For past few days has exhibited various childish and silly acts of a meaningless and monotonous nature. Still mute except for an occasional growl. Became very untidy today, but when reprimanded and told he must use ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... dots, strove to read a meaning into them. The Hollow Needle! What a bewildering conjunction of two simple words! What an incomprehensible question was set by that scrap of paper, whose very origin and manufacture were unknown! The Hollow Needle! Was it a meaningless expression, the puzzle of a schoolboy scribbling with pen and ink on the corner of a page? Or were they two magic words which could compel the whole great adventure of Lupin the great adventurer to assume its true ...
— The Hollow Needle • Maurice Leblanc
... it she was slowly becoming inured; but the strangeness of her life she could not yet comprehend—its meaningless days and nights, its dragging hours—and the strange people around her immersed in their sordid pleasures—this woman—her husband's sister, thin-lipped, hard-featured, drinking, smoking, gambling, shrill in disputes, merciless of speech, venomously ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... chair, overcome by a strange weakness. The clock struck ten—it was only ten o'clock! Suddenly she remembered that she had not ordered dinner...or were they dining out that evening? Dinner—dining out—the old meaningless phraseology pursued her! She must try to think of herself as she would think of some one else, a some one dissociated from all the familiar routine of the past, whose wants and habits must gradually be learned, as one might spy out the ways of ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... exceptions, did not impress me more favorably here than at the Champs-Elysees. They have a used-up look; their features are meaningless, or rather they have all the same meaning. The proud, stalwart bearing which we find in the portraits of our ancestors—men who joined moral to physical vigor—has disappeared. Yet in this gathering there was one man of remarkable ability, who stood out from the rest by the beauty of his face. ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... assimilate its spirit. There can be no worthy or adequate rendering of a great poem or prose selection without a keen appreciation of its inner meaning and content. This is the principal safeguard against mechanical and meaningless declamation. The extent of this appreciation and grasp of the inherent spirit of thought will largely determine the degree of life, reality, and impressiveness imparted to ...
— Talks on Talking • Grenville Kleiser
... have some clear reason to the contrary, avoid the use of expressions that have been used so much that they are worn out and often almost meaningless. Such expressions as the following ones are not wrong, but are often used when they ...
— Practical Grammar and Composition • Thomas Wood
... have dignified her most frequent occupation by the title of profession. With a thin blue scarf turbaned round her head in floating ends, and with scanty and clinging array otherwise, tossing a tambourine, and singing wild, meaningless songs, she used to whirl and spring on the grass-plot of an evening, the young masters and mistresses smiling and applauding from the verandah, while the wind-blown flame of a flaring pitch-pine knot, held by little Pluto, gave her strange careering ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... for a saying sufficiently orotund and meaningless to content his ethics, and to be hailed with convenience as a great moral principle, the eagle forgot all about Count Manuel: but the stork did not forget, because in the eyes of the stork the life ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... term of disgust used to describe a program. The connotation in this case is that the program works as designed, but the design is bad. Said, for example, of a program that generates large numbers of meaningless error messages, implying that it is on the brink of imminent collapse. ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... over Lady Charlotte drove her flocks, of much the same pattern, like billows before a piping gale. They might be similar—a puffed iteration, and might be meaningless and wearisome; the gale was a power ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... even in the most rudimentary degree, a beginning is made with us that is designed to carry us far, if we but follow the leading of our hearts. There is an ideal toward which all our experience points. If it were not so, life would be a hopeless enigma, and the world a meaningless farce. There must be a spiritual function intended, a design to build up strong and true moral character, to develop sweet and holy life, otherwise history is a despair, and experience a hopeless riddle. All truly great human life has been lived with a spiritual outlook, and on a high ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... for the territory of the Maharaja of Kashmir are meaningless. In the huge Indus valley the incidence is only 4 persons per sq. mile. In Jammu and Kashmir it is 138. The map taken from the Census Report gives the details. The increase in the decade was on paper 8-1/2 p.c., distributed between 5-1/4 in Jammu, ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... for pension on the shelf of General Duty is an object at once pitiful and ludicrous. His profession has ebbed away from him, and he lies a melancholy derelict on the shore, with sails flapping idly against the mast and meaningless ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... fond of quoting ballads. He gives a form of the first verse in Otterburn which is common to Herd and the English copy. He says that, according to some, Douglas was treacherously slain by one of his own men whom he had offended. "But this narration is not so probable," and the fact is fairly meaningless in Herd's fragment (the boy has no motive for stabbing Douglas, for if his report is true, he will be rewarded). The deed is probably based on the tradition which Godscroft thought "less probable,"—the treacherous murder of ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... the assaults of their opponents, but because of their impotence in the face of a grave national crisis. Nevertheless, they were on all essential issues beaten by the Democrats; and on the few occasions on which they were victorious, their victories were both meaningless and fruitless. ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... was the testy interruption; "but the world is not so easily led in matters of religion. The message, as you say, is divine; but it may sound like meaningless twaddle to the world at large. If we are to heal mankind and dispel the heresy of disease and death, why can't Holiest Mother save herself? Mind you, I am looking at this thing with ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... Romish Church, is, to vast numbers, a dead language,—an unknown tongue. There are hundreds of words and phrases used by preachers and religious writers which neither they nor their hearers or readers understand. In some of them there is nothing to be understood. They are mere words; meaningless sounds. Some of them have meanings, but they are hard to come at, and when you have got at them you find them to be worse than none. They are falsehoods that lurk within the dark and antiquated words. I have heard and even read whole sermons in which nine sentences out of ten had no more meaning ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... not read, or the illegible, meaningless ink scrawl upon the sheet within the boldly-addressed envelope would have aroused his suspicions at the outset. So well had Bough, that expert in human frailty, understood his subject, that the letter was a bogus letter, a fraud, not elaborate—a mere stage property, nothing ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... justifies the use of analogy in matters of religion, and is of great importance. One might almost dare to say that all conclusions about the world above us which are not based on the analogy of our own mental experiences, are either false or meaningless. ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... confess I believed that I had lived for that smile six years, and suffered a bad noise for the sound of your voice. It seemed but a minute until we found ourselves almost alone with the solid women at the ices. One swift phrase from you, and we had slipped back through the meaningless years till we stood there in the parlor at Grant Street, mere boy and girl. The babbling room vanished for a few golden moments. Then you rustled off, and I believe I told Mrs. Goodrich that musicales were very nice, for they gave you a chance to talk. And I went to the dressing-room, wondering ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... reading about them too, Lucilla; as I like reading other grand poetry. But, surely, we ought both to do more than like it? Will God be satisfied with us, think you, if we read His words, merely for the sake of an entirely meaningless poetical sensation? ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... had been eaten, the last drop of water nearly exhausted. The strongest might endure for a day or two, the weakest ones must sink within a few hours. Even O'Carroll, strong as he seemed, was giving way. He sat dull and unconscious, his eyes meaningless, only arousing himself by a great effort. My brother's head rested on my arm, and I was moistening his lips with the few drops obtained from the cask. Suddenly Kelson, who had been gazing round the horizon, started up, crying out, "A ...
— James Braithwaite, the Supercargo - The Story of his Adventures Ashore and Afloat • W.H.G. Kingston
... personage drive up in a magnificent carriage. A dread foreboding seized him. Dull stupefaction, and thoughts scurrying like mice, vague terror, and the numbness of expectation and the weight of crushed tears in his heavy-laden breast, on his lips the forced, empty smile, and a meaningless prayer—addressed ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... think, however, that these persons are commonly fools. I have known a number, and all of them were intelligent. I think nothing conveys the idea of UNDERBREEDING more than this self-betraying smile. Yet I think this peculiar habit as well as that of MEANINGLESS BLUSHING may be fallen into by very good people who met often, or sit opposite each other at table. A true gentleman's face is infinitely removed from all such paltriness,—calm-eyed, firm-mouthed. I think Titian understood the look of a gentleman as well as anybody that ever lived. The portrait ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the two separate averments in the second chapter of Genesis, both entirely meaningless apart from the construction we here give it, that "out of the ground made the Lord God to grow" the vegetation of the earth, and "out of the ground" produced he (or caused to be produced) every beast of the field, etc.,—all of which has a definite and comprehensive significance ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... had a delicate constitution, and in his case "hard labour" was a meaningless sentence, and imprisonment was no punishment to him whatever. To have made it more severe would have been all the same to him, as the hospital would then have been his perpetual abode. Some prisoners were in hospital nearly the whole of their sentence. One prisoner lay ...
— Six Years in the Prisons of England • A Merchant - Anonymous
... dreadful sufferings of mankind. We have inherited Christianity without Christ; we have the painted shell of a religion, and that which rattles around within it is not the burning soul of the Great Iconoclast, but a cold and shriveled and meaningless tradition. Oh! for the quick-pulsing, warm-beating, mighty human heart of the man of Galilee! Oh! for his uplifted hand, armed with a whip of scorpions, to depopulate the temples of the world, and lash his recreant preachers into ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... Greece the adjectival clan-name early disappeared, it became, among the Italians generally and not merely among the Romans, the principal name; and the distinctive individual name, the -praenomen-, became subordinate. It seems as if the small and ever diminishing number and the meaningless character of the Italian, and particularly of the Roman, individual names, compared with the luxuriant and poetical fulness of those of the Greeks, were intended to illustrate the truth that it was ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... perfectly possible for a strong and handy man, accustomed to agricultural pursuits, to earn a living from the soil, my example has little to teach in this direction. The cry of 'Back to the Land' will be meaningless until general ownership in the land is made possible. It is the burden of rent, often a cruel and unjust rent, that has driven men from the land. Not far from me at Thornthwaite there resided a man and his wife who were among the most frugal and industrious persons ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... all profane did not trouble Ann in the least. It was a meaningless trick of speech. Markham meant no more at this time by his most shocking oaths than does any man by his habitual expletive. Ann knew this perfectly. ...
— The Zeit-Geist • Lily Dougall
... win many a grateful smile from anxious mothers, by capturing and picking up little toddlers who would persist in running about and falling down right in the way of hurrying passengers. He also kept an eye on the old ladies, who were so flustered and bewildered, and asked such meaningless questions of everybody, that he wondered how they were ever to reach ...
— Cab and Caboose - The Story of a Railroad Boy • Kirk Munroe
... the code. Then these detached and meaningless words took on a significance which she could not afford ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... cease within this generation or the next to be an affair of the most baffling mystery to our town folk. Me, also, it amazed; though my emotion was chiefly concerned with those gracious effects which the gods continued to manage from that apparently meaningless sojourn of J. ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... five minutes after, LeBlanc and Green breezed by, not letting any grass grow under their feet. I've marked the spot well, and have located a good trail all the way, using private signs of our own that would be meaningless even to a woodsman familiar with all trail markings and signs. Fact I discovered one or two unfamiliar trail signs, that I could not recognize, and I believe they are the ones put there by a smuggler band. I'm ...
— The Ranger Boys and the Border Smugglers • Claude A. Labelle
... qualities, that the world was delighted with them. After him, however, the lowered aim had its influence; poorer artists tried to follow in his footsteps, and the world of art soon became flooded with mediocre examples of these meaningless pictures. All this hastened rapidly the decay of ...
— Barbara's Heritage - Young Americans Among the Old Italian Masters • Deristhe L. Hoyt
... night. During all this time he seemed cheerful, and spoke quite lucidly on various topics. In particular, he exhibited to his colleague a curious strip of what looked like ancient papyrus, on which were traced certain grotesque and apparently meaningless figures. This, he said, he had found some days before on the bed of a poor woman in one of the horribly low quarters that surround Berlin, on whom he had had occasion to make a post-mortem examination. The woman had suffered from partial paralysis. She had a small young family, none of whom, ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... of nothing on earth which is so totally lacking in expression as an egg. The great desert Sphinx, brooding through its veil of sand, has not that tremendous and meaningless dignity which wraps the colorless oval effort ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... Brahma. We must not shrink to avow this. Our existence is meaningless if we never can expect to realise the highest perfection that there is. If we have an aim and yet can never reach it, then it is no ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore
... that use these hymns the child is frequently not in the Sunday services; he is in the children's service or the school, while in the majority of churches a weak-minded endeavor for amusement has substituted meaningless rag-time trivialities for rich and dignified hymns. Perhaps the custom of encouraging congregations to jig, dance, cavort, or drone through the frivolities of "popular" gospel songs is only a passing craze, but it is a most unfortunate one; it tends to divorce worship ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... question had fallen upon deaf ears. The car had stopped before the entrance to the theatre. She stepped out even before he could assist her, hurried across the pavement and looked back at him for one moment only before she plunged into the dark passage. She nodded, and there was an utterly meaningless ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... 'ticking-over props' for us to pass, the different-colored lights which were being fired down from machines already in the air and the lights fired up from the ground, all combined and whirled through my excited brain like a meaningless nightmare. Then there was a deafening roar and we shot down a path of light, bumped hard, bumped less hard, bumped again, and the huge plane with its great load of bombs was in the air. Lights on the ground and the lights of machines in the air ...
— Night Bombing with the Bedouins • Robert Henry Reece
... listening, but the tic-toc seemed to fit the syllables of his name; and when, annoyed, she made a half disdainful mental attempt to substitute other syllables, it proved too much of an effort, and back into its sober, swinging rhythm slipped the old clock's tic-toe, in wearisome, meaningless repetition: ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... that he gets as much money that's due him as possible, when you get to Gram. And ask Duke Angus, as a favor to give him some meaningless position with a suitably impressive title, Lord Chamberlain of the Ducal Washroom, or something. Then he can prime him with misinformation and give him an opportunity to sell it to Omfray of Glaspyth. Then, ...
— Space Viking • Henry Beam Piper
... displacing the organs of her body, unfitting her to be a mother, causing more than half the surgical operations in the hospitals. She will then discuss character more than fashion. She will be ashamed of her silly, giggling and meaningless conversation. God said, "a man shall not wear that which pertains to a woman neither shall a woman put on a mans garment for all that do such things are an abomination unto God" women will then see the vulgarity and immodesty and sin in dressing in male attire or in any other ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation
... smile, which could maintain a long, but somewhat meaningless, brilliance. She employed it now, and it lasted until ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... able to come to an agreement as to what portion of the papers should be published, although both Governments have long since promised publication. The words used in the House of Commons by Sir Edward Grey were altered by the French Government into meaningless words, and the words actually used excluded by Governmental action from every ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... about him; religio, the sense of awe and of dependence, must have been constantly with him. But even here we may see, I think, a possible germ of religious development; for without this feeling of awe religious forms tend to become meaningless: lull religio to sleep, and the forms cease to represent effectively man's experience of life. We have to see later on how this paralysis of the religious instinct did actually take ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... of tea manufacture, of the repeated, meaningless, tossing back and forth and Chinese juggling with the abused tea leaves, are but too familiar to students of the subject: and too disappointing also, when we are moved to ask—Why all this manipulation? What is the nature of the chemical ...
— Tea Leaves • Francis Leggett & Co.
... look upon all by which it speaks to us more clearly than to brutes, upon all which bears witness to the intention of the Supreme, that we are to receive more from the covering vault than the light and the dew which we share with the weed and the worm, only as a succession of meaningless and monotonous accidents too common and too vain to be worthy of a moment of watchfulness, or a glance of admiration. If in our moments of utter idleness and insipidity, we turn to the sky as a last resource, which of its phenomena ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... of them, give me the impression of being copied by very unintelligent scribes, who had but little idea of the meaning of the words which they were transcribing. In all, the superscription V.S. is expanded (wrongly, as I believe) into 'Viro Senatori;' for 'Praefecto Praetorio' we have the meaningless 'Praeposito;' and the Agapitus who is addressed in the 6th, 32nd, and 33rd letters of the First Book is turned, in defiance of chronology, into ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... way that the adult wins the battle of religious education. In the deeper and more far-seeing sense he has lost it. Religion has become, not a charming privilege, but a lesson, a lesson about unbelievable things, a meaningless task to be learnt by heart, a drudgery. It may be said that even if that is so, religious lessons merely share the inevitable fate of all subjects which become school tasks. But that is not the case. Every other subject which is likely to become a school task is apt to become intelligible and ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... discourse; but owing to the fact that Robbie's blow had fallen about the blacksmith's eyes, and that those organs had since become sensibly eclipsed by a prodigious and discolored swelling, what was meant for a withering glance looked more like a meaningless grin. At this apparent levity under her many distresses, Liza's wrath rose to boiling point, and she burst out upon Mr. Joseph with more of the home-spun of the country-side than ever fell from ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... many people, both men and women, married and single, say that without children marriage is meaningless, in which opinion I heartily concur. More than one young woman dowered with generous blood, vitality, and courage has confided in me that whether she should marry or not she wished to be a mother at all costs. It is one of the disastrous results of men's shrinking from matrimony that fine ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... was that Mrs. Hopkins saw herself as others saw her. She ceased making these empty and meaningless apologies, and became a wiser and better woman. The next time Superintendent Robson went to the Squire's he found a "house fit for him to stay in and things fit ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... Chandler, being a Greenbacker on principle, was a regularly elected delegate and by courtesy was added to a sub-committee on resolutions. The one prepared by the National Association was placed in her hands, but, as she was forbidden to speak upon it, her support could only be given by vote, and a meaningless substitute took its place. The courtesy of placing Mrs. Chandler upon the committee was like much of man's boasted chivalry to woman, a seeming favor at ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... center right there—focus there, as at a point. Let kings and emperors continue to strut and mouth vain phrases; let our own President and Congress make the motions of governing; even let Wall Street play at finance and power. All, all are empty and meaningless! ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... away into meaningless words, and the light left his face. He moved in Robin's arms and sighed. Then, as his body rolled slowly over, and he lay with his back turned to them, they saw that his worst wound was in it—a dastard's blow. So ended the life of Will o' th' Green—or Will ...
— Robin Hood • Paul Creswick
... contain archaic expressions, for which the shaman can assign a meaning, but whose etymology cannot now be learned; and some embody obsolete words whose meaning is lost even to the priesthood. There are many vocables known to be meaningless and recited merely to fill out the rhythm or to give a dignified length to the song. For the same reasons a meaningless syllable is often added ...
— The Mountain Chant, A Navajo Ceremony • Washington Matthews
... and yet..." She lowered her head and began to trace a meaningless pattern on the cloth before she resumed. "You've given me to understand I'm responsible for your sudden awakening, that it's because of a regard conceived for me you're so anxious to become an honest man. Suppose ... suppose you were to find out ... ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... formula that defines the law of each individual life. All this is not intended to mean that we have each named a clear and definite ideal which is our chosen goal. On the contrary, such a conception may be almost meaningless to some of us. In general the higher the ideal the vaguer and less vivid is its presentation to our consciousness. But, named or unnamed, sharp or blurred, vivid or half-forgotten, there may be found in the heart of every man that which of all things he wants to be, that which of all deeds ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... practise quick additions, subtractions, multiplications and divisions, in pure arithmetical form, if the pretence purpose is clearly in view, which to them is a real purpose; the same thing occurs in writing which should be considered a side issue of reading; meaningless words or sentences are written wearily and without pains, but to write the name of a picture you have painted, at the bottom of it, or to write something that Cinderella's Godmother said, or bit by bit to write a letter, will ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... an audience resents having its time wasted by a long, floundering, meaningless preamble, and it is sure to get even. Next time it will come late to avoid that preliminary "catch as catch can" performance or—it will ...
— The Art of Lecturing - Revised Edition • Arthur M. (Arthur Morrow) Lewis
... achieve it. Our life is simple and innocent. We are untouched by ambition, and what pride we have is due only to our contemplation of the work of our hands. Malice cannot touch us, nor envy attack. Ah, <i mon cher monsieur>, they talk of the blessedness of labour, and it is a meaningless phrase, but to me it has the most intense significance. ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... and so it went on, constantly increasing, till it reached in our day the logical climax of the dogmas of transubstantiation and the infallibility of the Pope, or of the bishops, or of Scripture, and of requiring a blind faith rendered incomprehensible and utterly meaningless, not in God, but in Christ, not in a doctrine, but in a person, as in Catholicism, or in persons, as in Greek Orthodoxy, or in a book, as in Protestantism. The more widely Christianity was diffused, and ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... The alleged destruction of memories by an injury to the brain is but a break in the continuous progress by which they actualize themselves."[Footnote: Matter and Memory, p. 160 (Fr. p. 134).] It is then futile to ask in what spot past memories are stored. To look for them in any place would be as meaningless as asking to see traces of the telephonic message upon ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... committed. One would rather have thought that a man had better be damned a thousand times over than allow of such a catastrophe; but, however this may be, the doctrine now suggested appears to be equally revolting, unless diluted so far as to be meaningless. It amounts to asserting that our love of our own infinitesimal individuality is so powerful that any matter in which we are personally concerned has a weight altogether incommensurable with that of any matter in which we have no concern. People who ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... on regular opium debauches sometimes. In this case perhaps it is very fortunate for some one that he was imprudent enough to take such heavy doses of the drug that the policeman picked him up, for a lot of papers were found on him. They are meaningless to me, but perhaps you can throw some ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... said, and, though the remark was meaningless, one might have thought, from Calypso's face—in which rose colour fought with a suggestion of submerged ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... and although I could not make out the expressions of their faces, in the gloom, yet I doubted not but that they were puzzled ones at that lengthy and apparently meaningless harangue. ...
— The Suitors of Yvonne • Raphael Sabatini
... grew before his fixed eyes, then quickly, so that at the last there was a complete picture where but an instant before had been but a meaningless mass of line and colour. Set on a hill were many low, square, flat-topped houses, brown in colour against the gray ground about them. In front of these houses was a larger structure of the same material, a church-like ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... interpenetrative, which the critical and inquisitive genius of the Renaissance opened for investigation. In the former of these regions we find two agencies at work—art and scholarship. During the Middle Ages the plastic arts, like philosophy, had degenerated into barren and meaningless scholasticism—a frigid reproduction of lifeless forms copied technically and without inspiration from debased patterns. Pictures became symbolically connected with the religious feelings of the people, formulas from ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... the first line of the lead on meaningless generalities. Get down to the facts at once. For instance, "The presence of mind and bravery of Fireman David Mullen saved Mrs. Daniel Looker from being burned to death in her flat, etc." We are willing to grant ...
— Newspaper Reporting and Correspondence - A Manual for Reporters, Correspondents, and Students of - Newspaper Writing • Grant Milnor Hyde
... cork, and haggard hair, gives him a truly awful aspect, remarked that the soil of the South was clotted with blood by fiends in human shape, (sensation in the diplomatic gallery.) The metaphor might be meaningless; but it struck him it was strong. These fiends were doubly protected by midnight and the mask. In his own State the Ku-Klux ranged together with the fierce whang-doodle. His own life had been threatened. (Faint applause.) He had received an express ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 2, April 9, 1870 • Various
... propositions for the discovery of fresh truth. Many pages of the Social Contract are mere logical deductions from verbal definitions: the slightest attempt to confront them with actual fact would have shown them to be not only valueless, but wholly meaningless, in connection with real human nature and the visible working of human affairs. He looks into the word, or into his own verbal notion, and tells us what is to be found in that, whereas we need to be told the marks ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... half-blown roses just bursting their sheaths in a glossy covert of amber tresses; and wondering that a coiffure with such poetic taste could have existed unknown in Brittany. As the marchioness stood, dropping sweet, meaningless words from her dewy lips, Bertha's hand was claimed by the Duke de Montauban, and she was led ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... terrible thing to have him tell you there was no longer any kick in your kisses. So I remain on my dignity. I am companionable, and nothing more. When we were saying good-by, the last time he went off to the city, and he looked up at my perfunctory and quite meaningless peck on his cheek, I felt myself blushing before his quiet and half-quizzical stare. Then he laughed a little as he turned away and pulled on his gauntlets. "The sweeter the champagne, I suppose, the colder it should ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... moment that they approach the monstrous or the terrible. An altogether vulgar and insignificant man will begin to please us the moment that a violent passion, which indeed in no way upraises his personal value, makes him an object of fear and terror, in the same way that a vulgar, meaningless object becomes to us the source of aesthetic pleasure the instant we have enlarged it to the point where it threatens to overstep our comprehension. An ugly man is made still more ugly by passion, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... bar; otherwise a hopeless confusion of the measure will ensue. Precision in this matter is the more requisite, because of the peculiarity in the measure. If the first step in each bar be not strongly marked, the valse measure has no chance of making itself apparent; and the dance becomes a meaningless galop. ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge
... jealousy was too importunate, and he resolved to make any effort to keep her for himself alone. He knew she had love for him, but he knew that love would not necessarily, or even probably, keep her entirely faithful to him. She thought too little of passing intrigues. To her they seemed trifles, meaningless, unimportant. She told him so, when he spoke his jealousy. She said, 'I love you. I do not love these other men. They are in my ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... in his sleep, feeling nothing, fearing nothing,—no, thou mighty Unknown, I do not fear! But then I hope nothing: I believe nothing. Those pleasant dreams of yours—God, Heaven, Immortality—are to me meaningless words. At times I utter them, and they seem to shine down like pitiless stars upon the black boiling sea in which ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... love to make them. We of riper years are inclined to forget how very strong was our pictorial instinct when we were young. A little girl may make on a sheet of paper a few irregular lines not very well connected, wholly meaningless to us, and see in them very plainly every lineament of her favorite doll. She sees no lines, no paper, only her own precious doll. A little later she will draw pictures to illustrate a story, and while we may see nothing in her work, she sees enough ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... I would return and find you again; I could not depart from France without finding and thanking you for all your kindness. In truth I am glad you came, for——." I tried to say more, but the words left my lips sounding so cold and meaningless the sentence ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... How did she know that? No woman on earth loved him as she did? What if he should show her the contrary? He must no longer love, only permit himself to be loved! This advice did not displease him. In fact perhaps it was sensible to direct a wild life full of adventures which, in reality, were meaningless, monotonous, and profoundly unsatisfying, into the channels of a regulation domestic existence. But if he himself decided to bring it to a close, it should not be the end which Else wished ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... exaggerated phrases are frittered into commonplaces, and the most impassioned words grow meaningless, what can a Spanish gentleman find to say when his heart is really touched?" ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... swamps, lagoons, terraces, meaningless rises and indentations of the ground, and two great brown grassy mountains on either side, are the principal and uninteresting objects in the valley through which we were riding. I despair of giving you an impression of the real thing. It is so ...
— A First Year in Canterbury Settlement • Samuel Butler
... difficult undertaking. The shepherds had been dispersed, but the flock refused to forsake the fold. From the nourishing food they had discovered in the Word of God, they could not be induced to return to the husks offered to them in meaningless ceremonies, celebrated in an unknown tongue by men of impure lives. The Gospels in French remained more attractive than the legendary, even after the bishop had abandoned the championship of the incipient reformation. Briconnet's ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... and in the things we laugh at; but clearest of all in dreams. I say the meaning is clear to the initiated because it does require special training and experience to analyze these seemingly nonsensical slips of tongue and pen, these highly elaborated and apparently meaningless dreams, into the wishes (instinct and habit impulses) which gave them birth. It is fortunate for us that we are protected in this way from having to face openly many of our own wishes and the wishes ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... class-room they had selected was in a remote part of the building, there was little immediate chance of detection. So the laughter of the party grew louder and sillier; the talk more foolish and random; the merriment more noisy and meaningless. But still most of them mingled some sense of caution with their enjoyment, and warned Eric and Wildney more than once that they must look out, and not take too much that night for fear of being caught. But it was Wildney's birth-day, ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... three charming pictures deserve to be better hung. The Stetson group illustrates the Impressionist method and result as well as anything in the Palace. Take his "Smugglers" or his "Summer Joy" (3311, 3317), and note how a few heavy and apparently meaningless dabs of color may be laid side by side on canvas in such a way that, when seen from a distance, they blend, until the picture not only outlines figures and foliage, but also glows with atmosphere, ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... purely social invitations from white persons. He always claimed that he could best satisfy his social desires among his own people. He believed that the question of so-called "social equality" between the races was too academic and meaningless to be worthy of ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... outset, discarded the traditional notion of a political Messiah, and recognized the truth that the happiness of a people lies not so much in political autonomy as in the love of God and the sincere practice of righteousness. The people were to be freed from the bondage of sin, of meaningless formalism, of consecrated hypocrisy,—a bondage more degrading than the payment of tribute to the emperor. The true business of the Messiah, then, was to deliver his people from the former bondage; it might be left to Jehovah, in his own good time, to deliver ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... did not answer. She was staring at the fateful telegram, reading it over and over again; the words now meaningless to her. But she had grasped their import with the first swift glance. Jack was ...
— The Motor Girls on Waters Blue - Or The Strange Cruise of The Tartar • Margaret Penrose
... inkling before. Sent him away with the notes of a melody floating through his brain, so that the merry laugh of his children will be a discord, and such a memory of a soft glance, that his wife's bright look will be meaningless.' ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... message been a false one," continued the Commissioner, "the matter would have been resolved into a meaningless hoax, but the message having been what it was, we find ourselves face to face with no ordinary problem. Remember, Inspector, that voices on the telephone are deceptive. Sergeant Sowerby ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... done little except respond to meaningless introductions all the evening, and nothing could have pleased him less at the moment. But, somewhat awkwardly, he began to edge his way through the press in the wake of his hostess. The next moment he halted and stood ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... her smouldering jealousy of Honor, and gave the lie to her amazing instant of revelation. But once during the meal she encountered her husband's eyes. It was as if he had put out a hand and touched her; and her partner's veiled love-making became a meaningless murmur at her ear. Yet the surface of her brain travelled mechanically along the beaten track of dinner-table talk: and Garth, finding her gentler and more serious than her wont, deemed his hour ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... and merry, and do their duty as faithfully as any Christian, yet to them Heaven and Hell are meaningless abstractions; God and the soul are problems they, with quiet cheerfulness, leave time ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... looked at her he could not but perceive—that a certain amount of social energy seemed to enliven Lady Dumbello when he approached her. She was given to smile when addressed, but her usual smile was meaningless, almost leaden, and never in any degree flattering to the person to whom it was accorded. Very many women smile as they answer the words which are spoken to them, and most who do so flatter by their smile. The thing is so common that no one thinks of it. The flattering pleases, ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... on Alderton's headstone is an ornament, apparently palms. It is not unusual to find such meaningless, or apparently meaningless, designs employed to fill in otherwise blank spaces, though symbols of death, eternity, and the future state are in plentiful command for such purposes. Something like this same ornament may be found on a very old flat stone ...
— In Search Of Gravestones Old And Curious • W.T. (William Thomas) Vincent
... over the meaningless code words when he took his seat in the second of the two buckboards with Frisbie. The first assistant waited until the horses had splashed through the shallows of the river crossing; waited further until ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... man. He felt it so; and to leave his ordinary scenes and occupations and lose a morning with little Fleda was a freshening of his better nature; it was like breathing pure air after the fever heat of a sick room; it was like hearing the birds sing after the meaningless jabber of Bedlam. Mr. Carleton indeed did not put the matter quite so strongly to himself. He called Fleda his good angel. He did not exactly know that the office this good angel performed was simply ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... And with these apparently meaningless words he turned to the shaken Boyle and, taking his arm, began to walk him up and down in the ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... of those bridges from life-point to life- point, over which we must sometimes pass at a foot-pace! Is anything more intolerable than the monotonous tramp, tramp, of the meaningless steps? Is anything more sickening than the easy sway of the bridge, which seems to make the whole world reel, while in truth it is only ourselves? If Wych Hazel had been asked afterwards who was at Mrs. Powder's, and what was said, and ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... had driven his horses around the house to be fed and watered and rubbed down, and Mrs. Wrinkle, uttering a fusillade of meaningless ejaculations and puffs of gratified horror, had disappeared in the house to pack, old Jason made a wry face and squinted comically at Henley. "I reckon Het wasn't too much overcome to keep 'er from shufflin' 'er cards in her little poker game with you. You ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... shake themselves free from 'brute facts' in the past, to be at liberty to deny them as facts, while retaining them as representative ideas of faith. If reality is defined to consist only in life and action, it is a meaningless abstraction to snip off a moment in the process, and ask, 'Did it ever really take place?' This awkward question may therefore be ignored as meaningless and irrelevant, except from the 'abstract' standpoint ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... religious books. There is no doubt that such literature has a tremendous influence on many young people; but it has little influence on others, probably in part because the somewhat mystical style of most religious writings is meaningless to ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow
... home. Further back from the river, on the opposite shore, other houses could be seen; the houses of the heathen village; but Eleanor's eyes were fastened on this one. Mr. Rhys said not one word; only he held her hand in a still closer grasp which was not meaningless. ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume II • Susan Warner
... appropriate greeting. Some of them would be queer, no doubt; but at least they would be an improvement on the wearisome iteration of "Good-evening" and "Good-morning," and the monotonous inquiry, "How do you do?"—a question so meaningless that it seldom tarries for an answer. Under the new and more natural system of etiquette, when you passed the time of day with a man you would know his business, and the salutations of the market-place would be ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke
... routine labour, particularly in the home, as infra dignitatem and hence intolerable. Out of' that notion arise many lamentable phenomena. On the one hand, we have the spectacle of a great number of healthy and well-fed women engage in public activities that, nine times out of ten, are meaningless, mischievous and a nuisance, and on the other hand we behold such a decay in the domestic arts that, at the first onslaught of the late war, the national government had to import a foreign expert to teach the housewives of the country the veriest elements ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... disfigured features otherwise regular and always impressive. It had seriously injured his eyes, entirely destroying, it seems, the sight of one. He could not, it is said, distinguish a friend's face half a yard off, and pictures were to him meaningless patches, in which he could never see the resemblance to their objects. The statement is perhaps exaggerated; for he could see enough to condemn a portrait of himself. He expressed some annoyance when Reynolds had painted ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... once for all in the mind of a Creator, or gradually in the creation itself, which from the first monad or protoplasm to the last of the primates, or man, is not, I suppose, to be looked on as altogether causeless, meaningless, purposeless; think of him only as man (and man means the thinker), with his mind yet lying fallow, though full of germs—germs of which I hold as strongly as ever no trace has ever, no trace will ever, be discovered anywhere but in man; think of the Sun awakening the eyes of ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... interchange of wit, the society of the Townshends, the Walpoles, the Williamses, the Edgecumbes; all the jovial, keen wisdom of Gilly, and Dick, and Horace, and Charles, as they called one another, for the meaningless prattle, the merry laughter of this half-English, half-Italian child, It redeems Selwyn in our eyes, and it may have done him real good: nay, he must have felt a keen refreshment in this change from vice to innocence; and we understand the misery he expressed, when the old ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... to marry. Time hung heavy on my hands. The preparation of my book, Criminals I have Caught, kept me occupied for some months. When it was published, I had nothing more to do but think. I had plenty of money, and it was safely invested; there was no call for speculation. The future was meaningless to me; I regretted I had not elected to die in harness. As idle old men must, I lived in the past. I went over and over again my ancient exploits; I re-read my book. And as I thought and thought, away from the ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... custom, not at that day so prevalent in Russia as now, was still by no means unusual. And though Piotr and Alexei and old Masha, besides, as a matter of duty, his father, were the names on Ivan's written list, they were all of them meaningless compared with that one gift for her for whom no gift in the world could be sufficiently ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... face showed him that he had said enough. "I had not thought of this," she said, after a silence that seemed long to him. "Our observations are so meaningless until we are given the thread to string them on! You must think better of this, Lucian. The relation that at present exists between us is the very best that our different characters will admit of. Why do you ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... the scrub. A few minutes later, the flag returned, this time direct towards the sap-head, and now the Colonel, armed with German and Turkish vocabularies, was there to welcome it. They halted about twenty yards away, and a rather fruitless conversation followed. The Turks jabbered excitedly a meaningless chorus, to which the Colonel, full of importance and dignity, replied with deliberate and forceful phrases of alleged Turkish and German, fluttering the while through the vocabularies and prompted and admired on all sides by an audience of officers and men. ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... of saving time, different notions of what wastes time and what does not, and much which the old world regards as politeness and good manners Americans consider as sheer waste of time. Time is, they think, far too precious to be occupied with ceremonies which appear empty and meaningless. It can, they say, be much more profitably filled with other and more useful occupations. In any discussion of American manners it would be unfair to leave out of consideration their indifference to ceremony and their highly developed sense of the value of time, but in saying this I do not forget ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... anti-Socratic and discrediting analytical intellect, insists that whatever unity may be had must come through instinct, not analysis. He refuses to recognize Plato's One in the Many, sees the whole universe as "a perpetual gushing forth of novelties," a universal and meaningless flux. Surrender to this eternal flux, he appears to say, and then we shall gain reality. So he relies on impulse, instinct, his elan vital, which means, I take it, on man's subrational emotions. We call it Intuitionism, but such philosophy in plain and bitter English is the intellectual ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... correspondent's method? With a large air of virtuous impartiality he adopts 1886 for his starting-point all through his tables. It may be my denseness, but beyond meaningless uniformity, I can see absolutely nothing in this method to commend it. I see, however, that it is very useful for optimistic purposes. Did it not strike the reader that, in most industries, 1886 was a year of bad trade, and that therefore its ...
— Are we Ruined by the Germans? • Harold Cox
... rather she had controlled him; but it was no use any longer, for the time had come, and they abandoned themselves to the terrible voluptuousness of unrestrained grief, in which there is a strange meaningless suggestion of power, as though it might possibly be a force that could affect or remove its own cause if but wild ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 7 • Various
... was the solution of the industrial problem offered and enforced by Christianity working through secular life; it presupposed the small social and industrial unit and becomes meaningless if conceived in the gigantic and comprehensive scale of modern institutions. "National guilds" is a contradiction in terms: it takes on the same element of error that inheres in the idea of "one big union." In certain respects the Christian guild resembled the modern trade union, ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... in hand or a scrap of paper, and strides up to a high desk, where he stands the whole time, resting his elbows upon it and never once opening his eyes or looking his class in the face; the worst type of Jewish physiognomy in point of intellect, though without its cunning or sensuality; the face meaningless, pale, and sallow, with low forehead, and nothing striking but a pair of enormous black eyebrows. The figure is dressed in a dirty brown surtout, blue plush trousers, and dirty top-boots. It begins to speak. The voice ...
— Principal Cairns • John Cairns
... sitting near the fire and the four leaders ranged behind him, I stood and told my tale, cutting out all that was meaningless from their point of view. As I had expected, there was no mistaking its effect on him. I had indeed, come back empty-handed. Yet he pulled himself together and said lightly, "Well, gentlemen, if the men of the Midlands are not for me, they are ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... mountain a-hunting. He repeated the song which he had been singing, and the wind as it swirled about the house must have caught his voice and carried it far. It was a song chronicling the deeds of the Great Bear, and had a meaningless refrain, "Eeon-a, Ha-hoo-jah! Eeon-a, Ha-hoo-jah!" But when he reached the advent upon the scene of the secondary hero, the Great Bear himself, very polite, speaking excellent Cherokee ("since we are alone," ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... the threshold of a third and last season, and having put away her almost meaningless mourning, there had stolen into her sense of security something irksome in the promise she had made to give Quarrier a definite ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... turn to the mouth for a further indication of character. It was large, the lips were thick, but without a trace of sensuality. They were dim in colour, they were undefined in shape, they were a little meaningless—no, not meaningless, for they confirmed the psychological revelations of the receding temples. The hands were large, powerful, and grasping; they were earthly hands; they were hands that could take and could hold, and their materialism was curiously opposed ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... between the bayonets of their captors. They were a sturdy lot, this fresh "bag" from the hills, of a fine fighting age, and much less famished and war-worn than one could have wished. Their broad blond faces were meaningless, guarded, but neither defiant nor unhappy: they seemed none too sorry for ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton |
