"Nothingness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... downtown to see Matthews about that pain right here and came home looking shrivelled, talking shrilly about nothing, and evading Pa's eyes. Followed months that were just a jumble of agony, X-rays, hope, despair, morphia, nothingness. ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... it!—anything to end the unbearable impact from on high. His body, assailed by a clamor that was physical torment, could not move; the vibrations beat him down with crushing force, while the shrieking voice rose higher, then grew faint, and, with a final whisper, died to nothingness. ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... feel that only the dregs of life remained to her, and they not worth drinking. The worst one can say of it is that it sins against the canon of practical convenience which enjoins on the prudent dramatist strict economy in suicide. The third case, Zoe Blundell's leap to nothingness, in that harsh and ruthless masterpiece, Mid-Channel, is as inevitable as anything can well be in human destiny. Zoe has made a miserable and hopeless muddle of her life. In spite of her goodness of heart, she has no interests and no ideals, apart from the personal satisfactions which have ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... elbow. Strange to say, I was not in the least hurt, and again my heart wept tearful thanks to God, for, had the accident happened at any other part of the hill, I must have been dashed, a piece of shapeless nothingness, ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... this short period of intensive training, "under men who were intelligent enough to know just what was needed and just how to go about to secure it"—men not hampered by any pedagogical nonsense or grown stale over a long attempt to discriminate between the "infinity of nothingness and the nothingness of infinity" (as one might summarize a rather common criticism), rather than to the former years of patient toil, and discipline, and accomplishment which had really laid the foundation so well that all were able thus to respond. The common ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... promote it, or it ceases not only to work but to be. For it exists only as it is made or rather only in the act and fact of its progress, and so for it not to progress is at once to return to impotence and nothingness. And it is we who maintain it in being, maintaining it by endless reiterated efforts of reflection, and so maintaining it we maintain ourselves, resting or relying upon it and using it as a source of strength and a fulcrum or a platform for further effort. ...
— Progress and History • Various
... Her voice trailed into nothingness as she disappeared into the kitchen. When she emerged again she was still enumerating the charms of the absurdly ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber
... be no more—no more forever—time never was when man wished for such an end; nor has the man ever been who did not in his heart promise himself something better. The monuments of the nations are all protests against nothingness after death; so are statues and inscriptions; so is history. The greatest of our Egyptian kings had his effigy cut-out of a hill of solid rock. Day after day he went with a host in chariots to see the work; at last it was finished, ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... forms,—ghostly arms seemed to wave and beckon, ghostly hands to unite in prayer,—and fluttering creatures in gossamer draperies of green and crimson, appeared to rise and float, and retire and shrink, to nothingness again in the rainbow drift and sweep of whirling foam. Errington gazed unconcernedly down on the seething abyss. He pushed back his cap from his brow, and let the fresh wind play among his dark, clustering curls. His nerves were steady, and he surveyed the giddily twisting ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... struggle succeeded in driving it to a sofa in the corner of the room, where it settled down and regarded him with great fear in its eyes. Determined to destroy it, he flung himself on the top of it, when, to his surprise and terror, it immediately crumbled into nothingness. He left the house early next morning, convinced that what he had seen was a ghost, but Mr. Spicer offers no explanation as to how one should classify ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... with the idea of substance. When told that God is an 'Immense Being,' without parts, and consequently unsubstantial, we try to think of such a Being; but in vain. Reason puts itself in a quandary, the moment it labours to realise an idea of absolute nothingness; yet marvellous to relate, Newton did distinctly declare his Deity 'totally destitute of body,' and urged that fact as a reason why He cannot be either seen, touched, or understood, and also as a reason why He ought not to be adored under ...
— An Apology for Atheism - Addressed to Religious Investigators of Every Denomination - by One of Its Apostles • Charles Southwell
... Close of Salisbury, with its sleepy bells and cushioned ease of immemorial Deans—or this poor threadbare passion of Perugia, where every stone is stained with blood, and where genius in painters and scholars and prophets and ecstatic lovers has throbbed itself away to nothingness? It would be foolish to seek an answer to this question, idle to institute a comparison, for instance, between those tall young men with their broad winter cloaks who remind me of Grifonetto, and the vergers ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... through the air to meet him. But, alas! exaltation of feeling lasts only a moment; it drops us where it finds us. If it were not so, how easy to be a hero! The dull reaction of the present, like a slow avalanche, crushed and ground me into nothingness. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... open to abuse, and it would be folly to pretend that it escaped abuse in New England; but there was in it an element manly, healthful and invigorating. On the other hand, those who shaped the character, and in a great measure the destiny, of New France had always on their lips the nothingness and the vanity of life. For them, time was nothing but a preparation for eternity, and the highest virtue consisted in a renunciation of all the cares, toils and interests of earth. That such a doctrine has often been joined to an intense ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... worthy: that the majority dictate, and scarcely any one ventures to oppose them; if any one does, he is immediately sacrificed; the press, obdient to its masters, pours out its virulence, and it is incredible how rapidly a man, unless he be of a superior mind, falls into nothingness in the United States, when once he has dared to oppose the popular will. He is morally bemired, bespattered, and trod under foot, until he remains a lifeless carcase. He falls, never to ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... hand of chance; And when I feel, fair creature of an hour, That I shall never look upon thee more, Never have relish in the faery power Of unreflecting love; then on the shore Of the wide world I stand alone, and think Till love and fame to nothingness ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry
... If our eye falls on the sad stories of men and women who have died by their own hand, how seldom do they speak in the scrawled messages they leave behind them as though they were going to silence and nothingness! It is just the other way. The unhappy fathers and mothers who, maddened by disaster, kill their children are hoping to escape with those they love best out of miseries they cannot bear; they mean to fly together, as Lot fled with ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... of these he went to that system of philosophy which rests on the idea that the world is to be redeemed by negation of the will to live, the conquering of all desire—that the highest happiness is the achievement of nirvana, nothingness. This conception finds its highest expression in the quietism and indifferentism of the old Brahmanic religion (if such it can be called), in which holiness was to be obtained by speculative contemplation, ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... automatically along the way by which he had come, and, entering his hotel, sat down over the breakfast, staring at nothingness. He went on eating and drinking unconsciously till on a sudden he demanded his bill; having paid which, he took his dressing-bag in his hand, the only luggage he had brought with him, and ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... the window again and faced me, and her eyes were glowing with the light of love. Again for the moment we were face to face with the perils that menaced us from the outside, and before that consideration, all else faded to nothingness with Zara. A little while ago she had repudiated me, but all-conquering Love had stepped in again, had overpowered her, enthralled her, and I could see that she was more than ...
— Princess Zara • Ross Beeckman
... him; that she belonged to him, and to him alone; and the broken-hearted beggar followed the weeping Honoria towards his lady's chamber, with the step and bearing of a lord. He was wrong; there were pride and fierceness enough in his heart, mingled with that sense of nothingness of rank, money, chance and change, yea, death itself, of all but Love;—mingled even with that intense belief that his sorrows were but his just deserts, which now possessed all his soul. And in after years he knew that ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... lights and shades of what has been. Does not the happiness on the whole exceed the evil? Can you honestly say that this life has been a curse and not a blessing?—that it would have been better if it had never been called out of nothingness?—that it would have been better if the drama had never been played? It is over now. As you lay in his last home the object of so much love, ask yourself whether, even in a mere human point of view, this parenthesis between ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... of the lozen, more great and tempting than anything ever I saw abroad in the domains of princes. Its air was charged with peace and order; the little puffs and coils and wisps of silver-grey smoke, coming out of the fireplace into the room, took long to swoon into nothingness in that ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... bull-dog. All this does not matter at all. What does matter is that into the conception and execution of the Sphinx has been poured a supreme imaginative power. He who created it looked beyond Egypt, beyond the life of man. He grasped the conception of Eternity, and realized the nothingness of Time, and he ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... prayer stool, left.] She flees from me, as I flee from my bad thoughts! Alone, forsaken—what more is there for me in life? Naught have I learned of life save its nothingness, and no wishes are left to me but evil ones. My soul would be like an empty shell were it not filled with her! My life—Ah, what has it been? [Pall pounds on floor.] What was that?—Ghosts in the sunshine? That would be a ...
— Lucky Pehr • August Strindberg
... earth. They are not planted; they are not sown; their stump does not take root in the earth." The Prophet, having previously proved God's elevation over the creature, from the creation and preservation of the world, now proves it from the nothingness of all that which on earth has the greatest appearance of independent power. It costs Him no effort to destroy all earthly greatness which places itself in opposition to Him. He blows on them, and they have disappeared without leaving any ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... commentator uses the illustration of a tree. Before birth the tree was not; and after destruction, it is not; only in the interim, it is. Its formlessness or nothingness is manifest from these two states, for it has been said that which did not exist in the past and will not exist in the future cannot be regarded as existing in the present. Tadgatah is explained by the commentator as udayastamanagatah ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... lantern up shoulder-high, looking ahead, grew instantly stock-still, a shiver tingling along her spine. The narrow defile through which she had passed had led out of the ring of peaks and now abruptly debouched into nothingness. As she had turned with the twisting passageway, expecting to see another wall of rock before her, she saw instead the sky filled with stars. She stood almost at the edge ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory
... temporal prince, are covered over with a funeral shroud,—every object that strikes the eye, and every sound that vibrates on the ear, is an awful memento which reminds us of our approaching dissolution, points out the vanity and nothingness of all earthly grandeur, and convinces, us that in holiness of life, which unites us to God and secures an immortal crown in the enjoyment of the sovereign good, consists the greatness as well as the happiness ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... takes those Standard Rules, either one or the other, for their guide in writing?" This is the finest lesson ever offered to the furious heads of parties, and to all their men; let them meditate on the nothingness of their "Standard Rules," by ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... constructed as to be unreadable. Now it will not be denied that as far as these two factors are concerned—and I repeat they are almost always found in combination—the position of the Book has dwindled almost to nothingness. One could give examples of almost every kind: one could show how poetry, no matter how appreciated or praised, no longer sells. One could show—and this is one of the worst signs of all—how men will buy by the hundred thousand anything at all which has the hall mark of ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... of the man continued its headlong course. It was running in a circle of many miles, impelled through the nothingness of night by the dark soul raging ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... of this power is littleness. If you would remain powerful, remain petty. Be Nothingness. The serpent in repose, twisted into a circle, is a figure at the same time of the ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... melancholy, he asks, what might have been thought the thing he needed least, "Make me to know mine end;" and then he dilates on the gloomy reflections which he had been cherishing in silence. Not only he himself, with his handbreadth of days, that shrink into absolute nothingness when brought into contrast with the life of God, but "every man," even when apparently "standing" most "firm, is only a breath." As a shadow every man moves spectral among shadows. The tumult that fills their lives is madness; "only for a breath are they disquieted." ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... me this plaything, but with what have they replaced it?... With new wants, with new wishes, which Allah himself can neither weary nor satisfy. I thought myself a man of consequence; but now I am convinced of my own nothingness. Formerly, to my memory, my grandfather and great-grandfather were at the beginning of the night of the past, with its stories and dreaming traditions.... The Caucasus contained my world, and I peacefully slept in that night. I thought to be famous in Daghestan—the height of glory. And what ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... himself a mere novice in French gallantry, which is supported by an amazing volubility of tongue, and obsequious and incredible attention to trifles, a surprising faculty of laughing out of pure complaisance, and a nothingness of conversation which he could never attain. In short, our hero, who among his own countrymen would have passed for a sprightly, entertaining fellow, was considered in the brilliant assemblies of France as a youth ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... of cloud-enfolded spheres had vanished into nothingness. Thus, we looked upon the face of the slumberous deeps, and were alone. Alone, God, I would be thus alone in the hereafter, and yet be never lonely! I had her, and, greater than this, she had me. Aye, aeon-aged me; and on this thought, and some others, I hope to exist through the few remaining ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... wise to appear to avoid Courtenay. Indeed, she was studiously agreeable to him when they met. She adopted the safe role of good-fellowship, flattering herself that her own folly would shrink to nothingness under the hourly castigation thus inflicted. During this period, Mr. Boyle's changeable characteristics puzzled and amused her. As he grew stronger, and took part in the active life of the ship, so did his sudden excess ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... torn back a long black snake whip came down, wielded with merciless force. But he felt the full agony of the first blow only. The second seemed faint, and the third sent him plunging downward through a red mist into black nothingness. ...
— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson
... leaving behind them traces of their existence, memorials of their greatness. That a few defaced, dismantled, moss-grown or sand-choked fragments of these mighty buildings would one day be the only trace, the sole memorial of a rule and of nations that would then have past away forever, even into nothingness and oblivion, scarcely was anticipated by the haughty conquerors who filled those halls with their despotic presence, and entered those consecrated gates in the pomp of triumph to render thanks for bloody victories and warlike exploits which elated their souls in pride till they ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... fermentation and decay. Worms find their way to the roots; the caterpillar eats into the "boll" and destroys the staple. It would be almost impossible to enumerate all the evils the cotton-plant is heir to, all of which, however, sink into nothingness compared with the ...
— Camp-Fire and Cotton-Field • Thomas W. Knox
... bargaining, and begging, she had seated him at last in the Academie, she felt herself possessed by a certain veneration, forgetting that it was herself who had clothed him in that coat with the green palm leaves, in which his nothingness ceased to ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... gratitude to the original projectors of these institutions that we gazed on the soul-exciting scene before us. We thought of the enchantments related in the Arabian Nights' Entertainments, and they faded away into nothingness compared with what ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... knowing that it cannot be interesting to the majority who would never take the trouble to shape their lives as I seek to shape mine. Still, if there are one or two out of a million who feel as I do, that life and love are of little worth if they must end in dark nothingness, these may perhaps have the patience to come with me through the pages of a narrative which is neither 'incidental' nor 'sensational' nor anything which should pertain to the modern 'romance' or 'novel,' and which has been written because ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... And through the finale there quivers an illusory light. The movement is the march, the oncoming rush, of vast formless hordes, the passage of unnamed millions that surge for an instant with their cries and banners, and vanish into nothingness. It is possible that Sibelius will create another work similarly naked and intense. More definitive, ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... religious traditions of his people, his Gospel gained a footing which, later on, preserved it from dissolving in the glow of enthusiasm, or melting away in the ensnaring dream of antiquity, that dream of the indestructible Divine nature of the human spirit, and the nothingness and baseness of all material things.[46] But from the positive attitude of Jesus to the Jewish tradition, there followed also, for a generation that had long been accustomed to grope after the Divine active in the world, the summons to think out a theory ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... of beauty is a joy forever; Its loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness; but still will keep A bower quiet for us; and a sleep Full of sweet dreams, and health, ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... whole, the most vapid and vile examples of human want of understanding. In the folly of Claude there is still a gleam of grace and innocence; there is refreshment in his childishness, and tenderness in his inability. But the folly of Salvator is disgusting in its very nothingness: it is like the vacuity of a plague-room in an hospital, shut up in uncleansed silence, emptied of pain and motion, but not ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... principle of internationalism, the recognition, i.e. that distinction of nationality sinks into nothingness before the idea of the union of all progressive races in the effort to realise the ideal of true society as ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... minutes, and he saw that, while Tayoga was unconscious, the flow of blood was still held in check by the bandages. Resuming his burden, he went on through the forest, a full quarter of a mile now, and the last sound of the battle sank into nothingness behind him. He was consumed with anxiety to know who had won, but there was not a sign ...
— The Rulers of the Lakes - A Story of George and Champlain • Joseph A. Altsheler
... in the old place; the rest, all that is expressed negatively by such words as "nought" or the "void," is not so much thought as feeling, or, to speak more exactly, it is the tinge that feeling gives to thought. The idea of annihilation or of partial nothingness is therefore formed here in the course of the substitution of one thing for another, whenever this substitution is thought by a mind that would prefer to keep the old thing in the place of the new, or at least conceives this preference as possible. The idea implies on the subjective ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... Warrigal was eminently desirable as a mate. Now, in one instant, they both flew at Finn, one from either side of the trail on which he trotted with Warrigal. Warrigal herself slid forward, a swiftly-moving shadow, her brush to the earth, her hind-quarters seeming to melt into nothingness, as the jaws of her cousins flashed behind her on either side of Finn's throat. Then, when there were a dozen paces between herself and her new mate, she wheeled and stopped, sitting erect on her haunches, a ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... in the open doorway of the little house and watched the yacht's lights as they described a great curve through the darkness, then slowly faded into nothingness down the bay. Cherry drew ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... table with one arm resting on it, the emaciated hand tightly clutched, the body leaning forward, the eyes looking into nothingness. ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... were a thousand miles of open country, with woods and houses, caves and cliffs, to which men could flee for hiding; and the danger of rebellion was less dominant. At sea, a rebellion was like some beastly struggle in one room, beyond the walls of which was everlasting nothingness. The thing had to be fought out, as it were, man to man within four walls, and God help ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... borrowed from no writer in his three hundred inspired volumes, while Plutarch, Seneca, and the elder Pliny made such free use of their libraries; and it has happened that Epicurus, with his unsubstantial nothingness, has "melted into thin air," while the solid treasures have buoyed themselves up amidst the ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... mused the enthusiastic painter, as he trod the street. "Thou art the image of the Creator's own. The innumerable forms, that wander in nothingness, start into being at thy beck. The dead live again. Thou recallest them to their old scenes, and givest their gray shadows the lustre of a better life, at once earthly and immortal. Thou snatchest back the fleeting moments of History. With thee, there is no Past; for, at thy touch, all that ...
— The Prophetic Pictures (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... smile and would have been describable as roguish, only ... well, the eyes of a blind man, whatever else they are, are not conducive to a roguish mien. They were eyes not visibly damaged: nice blue eyes. And they stared at nothingness. I was in the presence of a stripling who, a few weeks ago, must have owned a mobile face, and was in rapid process of developing a quite different face, a face which still might—it certainly did—grin and laugh, but which would gradually gain, had already begun to gain, a set expressionlessness ...
— Observations of an Orderly - Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital • Ward Muir
... against God, who had allowed such a blind and cruel sequence of events to wreck the lives of two of His innocent children. When he took refuge in the Vatican he must have been clinging to some waif and stray of hope. It was gone now, and there was no use struggling. The nothingness of man against the pitilessness of fate made all ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... sufficient to allow them to distinguish their surroundings and enable them to scramble up the rough steps. At the top they found themselves in a huge garret, how big they could not tell, for the corners were completely lost in black nothingness. The floor was thick with dust (such old dust!), and was so worm-eaten and rotten that it felt quite soft and crumbling ...
— The Manor House School • Angela Brazil
... world, that sweet, strong sensation that gives one strength. "How sensible I was," he says, "to wall myself round with indifference! If one did not feel, but only understand, without giving fragments of oneself to other beings! ... It is strange to suffer from the emptiness, the nothingness, of this life, when one is resigned, as I am, to nothingness. But, there, I cannot live without recollections, and recollections sadden me. I can have no hope, I know, but I feel obscurely and unceasingly the harm of this ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... beautiful And holy visions, that have passed away, And left no shadow of their loveliness On the dead waste of life. The spectre lifts The coffin-lid of Hope and Joy and Love, And bending mournfully above the pale, Sweet forms that slumber there, scatters dead flowers O'er what has passed to nothingness. ...
— Songs from the Southland • Various
... the Charanas, rejoiced exceedingly. And deprived of universal dominion by the energy of the Brahma weapon, the five elements forsook the illustrious Ravana. And were consumed by the Brahma weapon, the physical ingredients of Ravana's body. His flesh and blood were all reduced to nothingness,—so that the ashes ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... the dream. I cannot put the glory With which it filled my being, in a story. No one can tell a dream. Now to confess. The dream made daily life a nothingness, Merely a mould which white-hot beauty fills, Pure from some source of passionate joys and skills. And being flooded with my vision thus, Certain of winning, puffed and glorious, Walking upon this earth-top like a king, My judgment ...
— Right Royal • John Masefield
... alike seemed to vanish as their hurtling flight sent them rocketing on for distances inconceivably vast through a bleak and appalling Nothingness, where neither sight ...
— Zehru of Xollar • Hal K. Wells
... chastenings of an all-wise and merciful Providence, sent for some inscrutable but just and beneficent purpose, it may be, to humble our pride, or to punish our unfaithfulness, or to impress us with the sense of our own nothingness and dependence on His mercy," when you are thus addressing your suffering fellow-subjects, and encouraging them to bear without repining the dispensations of Providence, may God grant that by your decision of this night you may have laid in store for ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... purposes of religious improvement—when combinations for political intrigue, or mercantile speculation, which now waken such intensity of interest in our cities, shall dwindle to their comparative nothingness; and when the world's redemption shall assume its proper magnitude; and all be stimulated to more holy devotedness, and more heavenly effort. Oh, what a day, when all our increasing facilities of intercourse with the land, and with foreign nations, shall be used mainly for advancing that ...
— The National Preacher, Vol. 2. No. 6., Nov. 1827 - Or Original Monthly Sermons from Living Ministers • William Patton
... viewed in the abstract, is never questioned; and yet the educational principles which it naturally suggests are too often jostled aside, and practically neglected. It plainly teaches us, that the young ought to be made aware of the comparative nothingness of temporal and sensual objects, when placed in competition with those which refer to their souls and eternity; and that the subjects which are to be taught them in the school, should tend to produce these feelings.—But this is not always the case; and even when the subjects are in ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... ketch Arangi, trader and blackbirder in the Solomon Islands, may have signified in Jerry's mind as much the mysterious boat that traffics between the two worlds, as, at one time, the boat that Charon sculled across the Styx signified to the human mind. Out of the nothingness men came. Into the nothingness they went. And they came and went always ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... flimsy fellow! If we take our hands from him, he will fall a heap of worn-out rags, and the angry wind will whirl him away, and leave us forlorn. Oh, let us spend our lives keeping him up, and serving him, and making him great—that is, evermore puffed out with air and nothingness—until he burst, and we along ...
— Clocks - From a volume entitled "Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow" • Jerome K. Jerome
... some extensive work on the Evidences of Natural and Revealed Religion. Have you let that intention go? Or are you doing any thing towards it? Make to yourself other ten talents. My letter is full of nothingness. I talk of nothing. But I must talk. I love to write to you. I take a pride in it. It makes me think less meanly of myself. It makes me think myself not totally disconnected from the better part of Mankind. I know, I am too dissatisfied with the beings around me,—but I cannot ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... the wave, burst, and are no more. They are too often like bomb-shells, that in exploding scatter ruin on all around. They have also been named air-castles, chateaux en Espagne, 'baseless fabrics of a vision.' The baseless fabric of a vision is built of 'airy nothingness;' but men found on a wish, structures that tower to heaven, put real, solid material into them, and when they fall, as fall they must—I'll not attempt to give an idea of the utter desolation they leave, of the waste place they make of the heart, lest you should think ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... falls, and when I die, What follows? Vacant nothingness? The blank of lost identity? Erasure ...
— Poems • (AKA Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte) Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell
... In comparison with the length of time thus required to efface the tiny individual atom, the entire cosmical career of our solar system, or even that of the whole starry galaxy, shrinks into utter nothingness. Whether we shall adopt the conclusion suggested must depend on the extent of our speculative audacity. We have seen wherein its probability consists, but in reasoning upon such a scale we may fitly be cautious ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... working up to the firing-line and the awful labour of carrying heavy men back to our dressing station: it went on. We got used to being always tired, and having only an hour or two of sleep. It was log-heavy, dreamless sleep... sheer nothingness. Just as tired when you were wakened in the early hours by a sleepy, grumbling guard. And then going round finding the men and wakening them up and getting them on parade. Every day the ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... highest and purest thought. To have known a great and exalted love and have it fade from your grasp and flee as shadow, living only in memory, is the highest good, he wrote. A great sorrow at one stroke purchases a redemption from all petty troubles; it sinks all trivial annoyances into nothingness, and grants the man lifelong freedom from all petty, corroding cares. His feelings have been sounded to their depths—the plummet has touched bottom. Fate has done her worst: she has brought him face to face with the Supreme ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... on Naples were repulsed, and their armies annihilated. In the spring of 1529 the Emperor got the upper hand in Lombardy also. How utterly then did the oft-proposed plan, of depriving him of the supreme dignity, sink into nothingness: he was stronger than ever in Italy. The Pope was fortunate in not having joined the allies more closely; the relations of the States of the Church with Tuscany made a union with the Emperor necessary; he had a horror of a new quarrel with ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... what species they were dealing with. He told them about the voyage from Saturn, brought them up to speed on what Mr. Micromegas was, and after lamenting how small they were, asked them if they had always been in this miserable state so near nothingness, what they were doing on a globe that appeared to belong to whales, whether they were happy, if they reproduced, if they had a soul, and a hundred other ...
— Romans — Volume 3: Micromegas • Voltaire
... the schemes of revolutionists! You judge him—as I do—to be in the grasp of the greatest Force which exists in the universe! The force against which there is, and can be no opposition!— a force, which if it once binds even a king—makes of him a life- prisoner, and turns mere 'temporal power' to nothingness; upsetting thrones, destroying kingdoms, and beating down the very Church itself in the way of its desires—and ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... an ocean of void, they did not admit the possibility that other such islands might exist beyond our ken. The spectacle of the starry heavens, which presented itself nightly to their gaze in all the brilliancy of a southern sky—that was all there was of being, beyond that lay nothingness. Democritus or the Epicureans might dream of other worlds, but the Stoics contended for the unity of the cosmos as staunchly as the Mahometans for the unity of God, for with ...
— A Little Book of Stoicism • St George Stock
... to yourself. My looks, my sighs, have spoke a thousand times; Now, to express it all, my voice must speak. If but you will look down with gracious favour Upon the sorrows of your worthless slave, If in your goodness you will give me comfort And condescend unto my nothingness, I'll ever pay you, O sweet miracle, An unexampled worship and devotion. Then too, with me your honour runs no risk; With me you need not fear a public scandal. These court gallants, that women are so fond of, Are boastful of their acts, and vain in speech; They always ...
— Tartuffe • Jean-Baptiste Poquelin Moliere
... Narkhanda Forest was ice-cool with the breath of night. Pines, ilex, and deodars clung miraculously to a hillside of massive rock, that jutted above him at intervals—threatening, immense; and often, on the khud side, dropped abruptly into nothingness. When the road curved outward, splashes of sunlight patterned it; and intermittent gaps revealed the flash of snow-peaks, incredibly serene ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... thunderbolt. But to these people, and more especially to Montezuma, whose mind was filled already with rumours of the coming of a strange white race, which, as it was truly prophesied, would bring his empire to nothingness, the omens seemed very evil. Indeed, if they had any doubt as to their meaning, it was soon to be dispelled, in their minds at least. For as we stood wonder-struck, a messenger, panting and soiled with travel, arrived among us and prostrating ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard
... much my heart is with you in your great scheme. I am not as sanguine as some of your admirers are as to the success you are sure to win; but I look upon it as a forlorn hope, in which a man had better lose his life than save it by ignoble do-nothingness." ...
— Darkest India - A Supplement to General Booth's "In Darkest England, and the Way Out" • Commissioner Booth-Tucker
... it was that on the morrow he should behold Veranilda. For a long time he had ceased to think of her; her name came to his lips in connection with artifice and intrigue, but the maiden herself had faded into nothingness, no longer touched his imagination. He wondered at that fantastic jealousy of Basil from which he had suffered. This morning, the caress of the warm air, the scents wafted about him as he rode over the great brown wilderness, revived his bygone ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... last few days whenever Wilfrid entered Seraphita's presence his body seemed to fall away from him into nothingness. With a single glance this strange being led him in spirit through the spheres where meditation leads the learned man, prayer the pious heart, where vision transports the artist, and sleep the souls of men,—each and all have their ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... against his chest, while the jacket's extra-long sleeves were tied behind his back. He walked where the attendants led him, but his eyes weren't looking at anything in the room. They stared at something far away and invisible, an impalpable shifting nothingness somewhere in the infinite distances ...
— Brain Twister • Gordon Randall Garrett
... abide; but through the shaft That held the polar pivot, eye to eye, Look now—blank nothingness! As though Change laughed At man's presumption and his puny craft, The star has slipped its leash and ...
— Artemis to Actaeon and Other Worlds • Edith Wharton
... have the proofs, general, to-day—at once, provided that we thoroughly understand each other. I am ambitious, general, and I have no wish to be driven back for a single day into nothingness, as I should be, if my enemies withdraw their confidence in me. Now I am, at least, a member of the senate; but if the senate is dissolved, and I should subsequently be deposed again from the head of the police, I should be nothing but Fouche—Fouche ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... sacred duty to perform. The vanities of the world will have less weight with you when you return from the graves of your ancestors. Go to the imperial vault, and learn from the ashes of the emperors and empresses who sleep there, the nothingness of all worldly splendor. Kneel down beside your dear father's tomb, and pray for humility. Tell him to pray for me, Josepha, for my crown weighs heavily upon my brow, and I fain would ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... all the earth, and counts its disciples, agents, and fanatics in every class of society which has had, and often has still, the ear of kings and nobles—which, in a word, can raise its creatures to the highest positions, and with a word can reduce them again to the nothingness from which it alone ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... Seer spoke, the awful Presence glided out of Nothingness, and sat, sphinx-like, at the feet of ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... rich in memorials of the olden times, as will appear by the sequel to the present paper—those strongholds of ancient despotism, which, by their very ruin, tell of the nothingness of man's power and ambition. We append the following observations of Mr. Britton, who has done more to make the study of antiquities popular, it has been truly observed, than all other antiquaries, past and present, put together. They do honour ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 478, Saturday, February 26, 1831 • Various
... and stealthily, and it seemed long before it attained full appreciation; but just as my spirit came at length properly to feel and entertain it, the figures of the judges vanished, as if magically, from before me; the tall candles sank into nothingness; their flames went out utterly; the blackness of darkness supervened; all sensations appeared swallowed up in a mad rushing descent as of the soul into Hades. Then silence, and stillness, night ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... philosophical poet, attracted by Indian literature, by pessimism, by the taste for nothingness, and the thirst for death, forcing admiration by his sculptural form and majestic rhythm; Sully-Prudhomme, another philosopher, especially psychological, manipulating the lyrical elegy with much art and, above all, infusing into it a grave, sad, and profound sensibility ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... not pause to reflect whether the arm which had been strong enough to smite to nothingness the venerable statesman in the plenitude of his power would be too weak to repel the attack of an obscure and disarmed partisan. He saw only a hated tyrant, murderer, and oppressor, as he considered him, and he meant to have ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... take as my husband our Lord Jesus Christ, and to give myself to Him as His spouse, although unworthy.' I asked of Him, as the dowry of my spiritual marriage, crosses, contempt, confusion, disgrace, and ignominy; and I prayed Him to give me grace to entertain dispositions of littleness and nothingness with regard to everything else." Though we cannot consider such covenants in general as wise in themselves, nor this one in particular as appropriate in its language, yet for a time it seemed to give greater strength to her holy resolutions and increased ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... time on futile labor, and not enough to use the rich resources our education has given us? Don't think me, my dear protector, eaten up by the desire to make a fortune, nor even by an insensate desire for fame. I am too much of a calculator not to know the nothingness of glory. Neither do I want to marry; seeing the fate now before me, I think my existence a melancholy gift to offer any woman. As for money, though I regard it as one of the most powerful means given to social man to act with, it is, ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... the cylinder there spurted a broad beam of dead black. There was a searing flash of blue-white flame as the black beam struck the cliff face. There followed a brief second during which the rock melted into nothingness in the heart of that area of blue radiance. Then the stabbing beam bored steadily on back into the cliff like the flame of a blow torch melting a way through a block ...
— The Cavern of the Shining Ones • Hal K. Wells
... shall Zeus, for all his proud self-will, Be humbled. On a wedlock he is bent Whereof the fateful offspring shall one day Hurl him from sovereignty to nothingness, And so fulfil the curse old Chronos spake, When from his immemorial throne he fell. And this his doom how to escape not one Of all the gods can rede him saving I. But to me all is known. Then let him ...
— Specimens of Greek Tragedy - Aeschylus and Sophocles • Goldwin Smith
... not find that natural, Fredersdorf? I have lived fifty years at this court, and accustomed myself to its stupidity, its nothingness, and its ceremony, as a man may accustom himself to a hard tent-bed, and find it at last more luxurious than a couch of eider-down. Besides, I have just lost a million in Nurnberg, and I must find a compensation; ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... paused—shrank from the thought presented to him—turned to a recess of the chamber—drew aside a curtain, that veiled a crucifix and a small table, on which lay a Bible and the monastic emblems of the skull and crossbones—emblems, indeed, grave and irresistible, of the nothingness of power, and the uncertainty of life. Before these sacred monitors, whether to humble or to elevate, knelt that proud and aspiring man; and when he rose, it was with a lighter step and more cheerful mien than he had worn ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... decided manner, and prescribed with much feeling the remedies most likely if not to cure, at least to prolong. These remedies were followed and gave relief; but at last the time had arrived when William was to feel that the greatest men finish like the humblest and to see the nothingness of what the ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... secret self within him. It was as if he had searched forever for this place and had just found it, and it answered, to the full, a queer mood of silence in his own heart. The wind had died down now. The last wail of a coyote—disconsolate on a far-away ridge—had trembled away into nothingness; the voices of the Little People who had chirped and rustled in the tree aisles during the daylight hours were stilled with a breathless, dramatic stillness. Such sound as remained over the interminable breadth ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... these hills showed crystalline, thin, icy, cameo-sharp; beyond, between, faint golden splotches of broad Sonoran plain faded away to nothingness; and, far beyond that nothingness, hazy Sonoran peaks of dimmest blue rose from illimitable immensities, like topmasts of a very large ship on a very small globe; and the earth ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... little wet ball of a handkerchief; for she knows that Willie is a privileged visitor in my studio. The door opened (it was ajar), and Ronald Macdonald strode into the room. I hope I may never have the same sense of nothingness again! To be young, pleasing, gifted, and to be regarded no more than a fly upon the wall, ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... to winning him back to consciousness. It was necessary to do so before attempting to move him again, and, sprinkling his face with water, she persuaded him to open his eyes, and after one little stare he slipped back into the nothingness he had come out of; and this was repeated several times, Kate redoubling her efforts until at last she succeeded in placing him in a chair. He sat there, still striving and struggling with his breath, ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... Peele Castle,' and the important reservations that must be borne in mind in describing Arnold as a Wordsworthian will become clearer. It is as a relief from thought, as a beautiful and half-physical diversion, as a scale of being so vast and mysterious as to reduce the pettiness of human life to nothingness,—it is in these ways that nature has value in Arnold's verse. Such a poet may describe natural scenes well, and obtain by means of them contrast to human conditions, and decorative beauty; but he does not penetrate nature or interpret what her significance is in the human spirit, as the more emotional ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... sprang up and leaped over them in serried ranks. They lay flat on the water and rushed toward the land. The storm whipped the white foam out of their mouths and drove it along the beach, where it hung gleaming on the bushes, and then vanished into nothingness. Right up to the shore they dashed, and then fell dead. But fresh hordes stormed shoreward from the offing, as though the land must be over-run by them; they reared, foaming, and struck at one another; they sprang, snorting and quivering, high in the air; they broke asunder in panic; there ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... him, met a knowing and conscious smile, looked right through the smile, and looked away again, all with the air of one who gazes out into nothingness. ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... wheels brought to a sudden pause, then the darkness of black, absolute night surged over and beyond the pain which for a moment had held Joan. She floated out, so it seemed, on to a sea of nothingness, and a great ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson |
