"Nullity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Nor will the wife be entitled to alimony where she has sufficient means of support independent of her husband. Permanent alimony is that which is allotted to the wife after final decree. By the Matrimonial Causes Act 1907, the court may, if it think fit, on any decree for dissolution or nullity of marriage, order that the husband shall, to the satisfaction of the court, secure to the wife such a gross sum of money or such annual sum of money for any term not exceeding her life, as having regard to her fortune (if any), to the ability ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... work the same miracles with pieces of wood and tobacco-pipe. It takes time for truth to operate as well as Homoeopathic globules. Many persons thought the results of these trials were decisive enough of the nullity of the treatment; those who wish to see the kind of special pleading and evasion by which it is attempted to cover results which, stated by the "Homoeopathic Examiner" itself, look exceedingly like a miserable failure, may consult the opening flourish of that Journal. I ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... itself in his glances and the movements of his head, as he looked round him with curiosity, was turned into comedy by a hat which ruled that mankind should have well-cropped hair and a staid demeanor, such, for example, as Mr. Arrowsmith's, whose nullity of face and perfect tailoring might pass everywhere without ridicule? One feels why it is often better for greatness to be dead, and to have got rid of ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... against (p. 210) advoutrers". Henry's conscience was convenient and skilful. He believed in the "ordinance of inseparable matrimony," so, when he wished to divorce a wife, his conscience warned him that he had never really been married to her. Hence his nullity suits with Catherine of Aragon, with Anne Boleyn and with Anne of Cleves. Moreover, if he had never been married to Catherine, his relations with Mary Boleyn and Elizabeth Blount were obviously not adultery, and he was free ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... preserve its social power unhurt, its political power must be broken; that the private bourgeois can continue to exploit the other classes and rejoice in "property," "family," "religion" and "order" only under the condition that his own class be condemned to the same political nullity of the other classes, that, in order to save their purse, the crown must be knocked off their heads, and the sword that was to shield them, must at the same time be hung over their heads ...
— The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte • Karl Marx
... looked out upon life in my Kunstwerk der Zukunft. As a matter of fact, it was Herwegh who at last, by a well-timed explanation, brought me to a calmer frame of mind about my own sensitive feelings. It is from this perception of the nullity of the visible world—so he said—that all tragedy is derived, and such a perception must necessarily have dwelt as an intuition in every great poet, and even in every great man. On looking afresh into ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... art, extinct in Italy, was revived solely by Cimabue, after he had received some training from Greek artists invited by the Florentine government to paint the chapel of the Gondi in the church of S. Maria Novella; for native Italian art was not then a nullity, and this church was only begun when Cimabue was already forty years old; Even Lanzi's qualifying statement that Greek artists, although they did not paint the chapel of the Gondi, did execute rude decorations in a chapel below the existing church, and may thus have inspired Cimabue, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... exaggerations may become accepted as beautiful and natural by an imitative public devoid of personal judgment, by the aid of suggestion. These deplorable effects of suggestion may last a long time till their nullity or their absurdity causes them gradually to disappear. But they are usually ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... many similar attempts from the days of Charles the First to those of the great Lord Chatham, and to our own—concluded in a nullity! Charles, disappointed in this predatory attempt, in despair called his second parliament—as he says, "in the midst of his necessities—and to learn from them how he was to frame his ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... published in the Newspapers, explaining to impartial mankind, in a legible brief manner, what the old and recent History of Herstal, and the Troubles of Herstal, have been, and how chimerical and "null to the extreme of nullity (NULLES DE TOUT NULLITE)" this poor Bishop's pretensions upon it are. Voltaire expressly piques himself on this Piece; [Letter to Friedrich: dateless, datable "soon after 17th September;" which the rash dark Editors have by guess misdated "August; "or, what was safer for them, omitted ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... the slaveholder? I grant there are; though it must be remembered, that there is one way of even murdering a slave, which some of the slave States do not only not forbid, but impliedly and practically admit[A]. The Professor should know, however, that all these statutes are, practically, a mere nullity. Nevertheless, they show the absoluteness of the power which they nominally qualify. This absoluteness is as distinctly implied by them, as the like was by the law of the Emperor Claudius, which imposed limitations upon the "jus vitae et necis" (the right of life and ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... and his future plans for expediting his daughter's recovery. Meanwhile Mrs. Poynsett and Cecil sat grave, dry-eyed, and constrained, each feeling that in Mr. Charnock's presence the interview was a nullity, yet neither of them able to get rid of him, nor quite sure that she would have ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... often do we pester our spirits with anger or sadness by such shadows, and entangle ourselves into fantastical passions which alter both our mind and body?... Enquire of yourself, where is the object of this alteration? Is there anything but us in nature, except subsisting nullity? over whom it hath any power?... Aristodemus, king of the Messenians, killed himself upon a conceit he took of some ill presage by I know not what howling of dogs.... It is the right way to prize one's life at the right worth of it, to forego it ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... narrow; worse than that, he is in a sense an artificial man, a creature of technicalities and specialties, removed alike from the broad truth of nature and from the healthy influence of human converse. In society, the most accomplished man of mere professional skill is often a nullity; he has sunk ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... busines, the poisoning of Sir Thomas Overbury, the great scandal of the reign. Robert Ker, or Carr, created Viscount Rochester 1611 and Earl of Somerset 1613, had cast his eye on the Countess of Essex, and, after a decree of nullity of marriage with Essex had been procured, married her in December 1613. Overbury, who had been Somerset's friend, opposed the projected marriage. On a trumped up charge of disobedience to the king he was in April 1613 committed ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... her mild as a sheep.' (Eustacie set her teeth.) 'Every one will be in the same story, that her marriage was a nullity; she cannot choose but believe, and can only be thankful that we overlook the escapade and ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a base and slavish eternity. It is amusing to notice that many of the moderns, whether sceptics or mystics, have taken as their sign a certain eastern symbol, which is the very symbol of this ultimate nullity. When they wish to represent eternity, they represent it by a serpent with his tail in his mouth. There is a startling sarcasm in the image of that very unsatisfactory meal. The eternity of the material fatalists, the eternity of the eastern ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... the power of her husband. Originally, no doubt, this power was absolute; the husband could even put his wife to death without a public trial. But the world was progressing, and that during the first three centuries after Christ the power of the husband was reduced in practice to absolute nullity I shall make clear in the following pages. I shall, accordingly, first investigate the rights of the wife over her dowry, that is, the right of managing ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker
... This chamber, after the abdication of Napoleon, was merely a superfetation. The departure of those peers, who formed part of the army, completed its reduction to an absolute nullity. Without patriotism, without energy, it confined itself to sanctioning with an ill grace the measures adopted by the representatives. M. Thibaudeau, M. de Segur, M. de Bassano, and a few others, alone raised themselves to a level with the state of affairs. M. Thibaudeau in particular distinguished ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. II • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... as well as for the contraventions of their captains and officers against the present treaty, and against the ordinances and edicts which shall be published in consequence of and conformity to it, under pain of forfeiture and nullity of the said commissions. ...
— The Medallic History of the United States of America 1776-1876 • J. F. Loubat
... is of course aware that the old Diet once reconstituted and recognised, one of the main laws of it is that "no organic change can be made without unanimity of voices," which was the cause of the nullity of that body from 1820 to 1848, and will now enable Austria, should Prussia and her confederates recognise the Diet, to condemn Germany to a further life of stagnation ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria
... found herself a nullity at the court of Francois I. Her young husband was in love with Diane de Poitiers, who certainly, in the matter of birth, could rival Catherine, and was far more of a great lady than the little Florentine. The daughter of the Medici was also outdone by Queen Eleonore, sister of Charles ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... two. Yet the clamour raised against the law at the time and after, was great; in the legislature their friends became numerous, and as each particular case was brought forward and considered, it was made an exception, and the act became a nullity. John Matthews was elected governor of the state, after Gen. Gadsden, for whom a majority of votes was first given, had declined serving. A bill was brought in to indemnify several militia officers who had been concerned in ...
— A Sketch of the Life of Brig. Gen. Francis Marion • William Dobein James
... thinking Spirit reconciled with the fact of the existence of evil. Indeed, nowhere is such a harmonizing view more pressingly demanded than in universal history; and it can be attained only by recognizing the positive existence, in which that negative element is a subordinate and vanquished nullity. On the one hand, the ultimate design of the world must be perceived, and, on the other, the fact that this design has been actually realized in it, and that evil has not been able permanently to establish a rival position. But this conviction ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... generation not only founded on contrarieties, but also creation. God, being all things, is contrary unto nothing; out of which were made all things, and so nothing became something, and omneity informed nullity into an essence. ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... majority of his neighbors in Garum. Mr. Pullet had bought the box, to begin with, and he understood winding it up, and knew which tune it was going to play beforehand; altogether the possession of this unique "piece of music" was a proof that Mr. Pullet's character was not of that entire nullity which might otherwise have been attributed to it. But uncle Pullet, when entreated to exhibit his accomplishment, never depreciated it by a too-ready consent. "We'll see about it," was the answer he always gave, carefully abstaining from any ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... man's style, as Buffon long since said, is the man himself. By style, I do not, of course, mean grammar or rhetoric, but that style of which Buffon again said that it is like happiness, and vient de la douceur de l'ame. When we find a man concealing worse than nullity of meaning under sentences that sound plausibly enough, we should distrust him much as we should a fellow-traveller whom we caught trying to steal our watch. We often cannot judge of the truth or falsehood of facts for ourselves, but we most of us know enough ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... text," said Lady Ashton, appealing to the divine, "on which you yourself, with cautious reluctance, declared the nullity of the pretended engagement insisted upon by ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... his age. His conception of marriage made no more impression on contemporary life than his Paradise Lost. Even his own Puritan party who had passed the Act of 1653 had strangely failed to transfer divorce and nullity cases to the temporal courts, which would at least have been a step on the right road. The Puritan influence was transferred to America and constituted the leaven which still works in producing the liberal though too minutely detailed divorce laws of many States. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... akin to the Hurons, and soon to be incorporated with them. The travellers visited seven of their towns, and then passed westward to those of the people whom Champlain calls the Cheveax Releves, and whom he commends for neatness and ingenuity no less than he condemns them for the nullity of their summer attire. As the strangers passed from town to town, their arrival was everywhere the signal of festivity. Champlain exchanged pledges of amity with his hosts, and urged them to come down with the Hurons to ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... day. Was it to be accepted or, if repudiated, should the authors of the disaster, the causes of the breach of faith, be surrendered in time-honoured fashion to the enemy as an expiation for the violated pledge? On the first point there was little hesitation; the senate decided for the nullity of the treaty, and it was likely that this view would be accepted by the people, if the measures against the ratifying officials were not made too stringent. For on this point there was a difference ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... had he not logically met and demonstrated, to his own satisfaction, the nullity of the religious dogmas on which New England faith was based? There could be no such inner life, he said to himself,—he had demonstrated it as an absurdity. What was it, then,—this charm, so subtile and so strong, by which this fair child, his inferior in age, cultivation, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... the head of the wolf: combativeness enormously developed, alimentiveness large, while conscientiousness is entirely wanting. On the other hand, look at this cranium. Here combativeness is a nullity—absolutely wanting—while the fullness of the sentimental organs indicate at once the mild and peaceful disposition ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... Marquis de Montespan has caused you. If you will confide in me,—that is, if you will let me represent your interests with the Cardinals and the Holy Father,—I heartily offer you my services as mediator and advocate with regard to the question of nullity. At an early age I studied theology and ecclesiastical law. Your marriage may be considered null and void, according to this or that point of view. You know that upon the death of the Princesse de ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... 'Tis in pain that Nature disposes them for maternity; in pain and illness, dangerous and prolonged, she brings maternity to its close. What is a woman after that? Neglected by her husband, left by her children, a nullity in society, then piety becomes her one and last resource. In nearly every part of the world, the cruelty of the civil laws against women is added to the cruelty of Nature. They have been treated like weak-minded children. ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... in Britain, or else that the British Parliament pay less regard to it here than there. But, that we do not point out to his Majesty the injustice of these acts, with intent to rest on that principle the cause of their nullity; but to show that experience confirms the propriety of those political principles, which exempt us from the jurisdiction of the British Parliament. The true ground on which we declare these acts void, is, that the British Parliament has no right ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... in the common case, the adulterous case: But there are duodecim impedimenta, twelve impediments, as we call them, all which do not dirimere contractum, but irritum reddere matrimonium, as we say in the canon-law, not take away the bond, but cause a nullity therein. ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson
... such were the dangers intimated by Spencer and St. Vincent in their letters, and he was distinctly cautioned against letting the enemy get to the westward of him. He might have consoled himself for indecisive action, which procrastinated disaster and covered failure with the veil of nullity, as did a former commander of his in a gazetted letter, by the reflection that, so far as the anticipations of the ministry went, the designs of the enemy were for the time frustrated, by the presence of his squadron between them and the points ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... succeeding centuries, the political nullity of the German nation, the absence of any strong popular element to make head against the petty despotism of the princes, and launch Germany in the career of progress. Hence the backwardness and torpor of the Teutonic race in its original seat, while elsewhere ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... with him in a new Baptism, that he was out of the way himself, and had mis-led them, for he did not finde that there was any upon earth that could administer Baptism, and therefore their last Baptism was a nullity, as well as their first; and therefore they must lay down all, and wait for the coming of new Apostles: and so they dissolved themselves, and turned Seekers, keeping that one Principle, That every one should have liberty to Worship God according to the Light of their ...
— Great Epochs in American History, Vol. II - The Planting Of The First Colonies: 1562—1733 • Various
... Government of Mexico ever submitted the protocol to the Congress, or ever treated or regarded it as in any sense a new negotiation, or as operating any modification or change of the amended treaty. If such had been its effect, it was a nullity until approved by the Mexican Congress; and such approval was never made or intimated to the United States. In the final consummation of the ratification of the treaty by the President of Mexico no reference is made to it. On the contrary, this ratification, which ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Polk - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 4: James Knox Polk • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... one has ever resisted a people who fight for their liberty and who defend their sacred rights. Your heroic endeavours have already reduced our unjust aggressors almost to complete nullity. Without infantry to cover their parapets, without artillery to fire their pieces, without money, without credit, and without support, they already make their last useless efforts. On our side, on the contrary, all is in abundance ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... "Its rising and perishing are by nature itself." "It is natural that the world should rise and perish."[97] While in Brahmanism absolute spirit is the only reality, and this world is an illusion, the Buddhists know only this world, and the eternal world is so entirely unknown as to be equivalent to nullity. But yet, as no revolt, however radical, gives up all its antecedents, so Buddhism has the same aim as Brahmanism, namely, to escape from the vicissitudes of time into the absolute rest of eternity. They agree as to the ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... me with a sight of your letter to him of the 22d Dec. last. I think I am not so clearly of opinion as you seem to be, that "the declaratory act is a mere nullity," and that therefore "if we can obtain a repeal of the revenue acts from 1764, without their pernicious appendages, it will be enough." Should they retract the exercise of their assumed power, you ask when will they be able to renew it? I know not when, but I fear they will soon do it, ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, vol. III. • Samuel Adams
... among this class of vagrants as almost "incredible." In that report he says—"The offspring of always careless, generally intemperate, and oftentimes dishonest parents, they never see the inside of a school-room, and so far as our excellent system of public education is concerned, it is to them a nullity." It appears that, at that time, in 12 wards of the city, there were 2,955 of these children, of whom two-thirds were females between the ages of 8 and 16. I am informed, also, by the Chief of Police, that 100 per cent. should now be added to this estimate; not all attributable, of course, ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... in the history of the Church marriages have not been annulled on equally uncertain grounds, but in this case the civil law would require proof—something to justify nullity. Failing that there would have to be collusion either on one side or both, and that is not possible—not to you, my child, not to the daughter of your mother, that dear saint who suffered ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... days of the Revolution, voted God from his throne. They abolished the Sabbath, and declared that Christianity was a nullity. They set apart one day in ten, not for religion, but for idleness and licentiousness. History informs us that the goddess of Reason, personified by a naked prostitute, was drawn in triumph through the streets of Paris, and that the municipal officers of ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... disputed with Wentworth over the possession of Michael. Wentworth, a sedate, self-centred young man of three-and-twenty, of independent means, mainly occupied in transcribing the nullity of his days in a voluminous diary, had taken charge of him virtually from his first holidays, during which Michael's father had achieved the somewhat tedious task of drinking himself to death. Michael's father had appointed Wentworth ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... that Government will probably be under the necessity of adopting strong coercive measures there; but whether they are adopted, or a temporary policy of expedients persisted in, nobody is there fit to advise what is requisite. The Duke of Northumberland is an absolute nullity, a bore beyond all bores, and, in spite of his desire to spend money and be affable, very unpopular. The Duchess complains of it and can't imagine why, for they do all they can to be liked, but all ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... keen sense of humor. Not long ago a distinguished member of the French parliament lunched with Monseigneur Ferrata and remarked: "How is it that the Church requires such a long lapse of time before pronouncing a decree of nullity of marriage?" "Well," replied Cardinal Ferrata, "before the end of the ten years' delay, it is usually found that one of the three dies or disappears, and that the petition consequently is no longer pressed!" A great change is noticeable in the Paris churches. They have ...
— Paris War Days - Diary of an American • Charles Inman Barnard
... office of a bishop in his day left little time for spiritual tillage either at home or abroad. Not only the bishops had to confirm, ordain to all orders, consecrate, anoint, impose penance, and excommunicate, but they had to decide land questions concerning lands in frank almoin, all probate and nullity of marriage cases, and to do all the legal work of a king's baron besides. The judicial duties lay heavily upon him. He used to say that a bishop's case was harder than a lord warden's or a mayor's, for he had to be always on the bench; they only ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson
... surface this time; he had gone deep down to the springs of human nature. He had not merely analysed the woman till her character lay in ruins around him, but he had built her up again out of the psychic atoms, and Laura was alive. She showed the hand of the master by her own nullity. In her splendid vanity she was like some piece of elaborate golden fretwork, from which the substance had been ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... in the hands of others to be used at their discretion. Though living, he was, dead as to all voluntary agency; though moving amidst the creation with an erect form, and with the shape and semblance of a human being, he was a nullity as a man. ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... us, struggle as we may. The only escape from faith is mental nullity. What we enjoy most in a Huxley or a Clifford is not the professor with his learning, but the human personality ready to go in for what it feels to be right, in spite of all appearances. The concrete man has but ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... him over to the Christian priesthood for punishment. A long time after he returned to the Jewish faith. But his thirst for knowledge knew no bounds, and he continued his researches till he found he'd reached absolute nullity; and in despair that he couldn't learn the final secret he took his own life with a pistol shot. (Pause.) Now look at our good father Uriel here. He, too, was once very young and anxious to know; he always wanted to be in the forefront of every modern ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg
... argument, they make an exception to prove the rule. None of your own liberties could stand a moment, if the casual deviations from them at such times were suffered to be used as proofs of their nullity. By the lucrative amount of such casual breaches in the Constitution, judge what the stated and fixed rule of supply has been in that kingdom. Your Irish pensioners would starve, if they had no other fund to live ...
— Burke's Speech on Conciliation with America • Edmund Burke
... were not moved by such scruples. They exercised a twofold jurisdiction,—as a diocesan and as a metropolitan tribunal,—and both affirmed the nullity of the marriage. The metropolitan tribunal, while admitting the first two grounds,—namely, the absence of witnesses and of the proper priest,—based its decision principally on the non-consent of the Emperor. The diocesan tribunal had declared that to atone for the ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... us, when age is stealing upon us, when we approach the zenith, and when destiny says to us: "Show what is in thee! Now is the moment, now is the hour, else fall back into nothingness! It is thy turn! Give the world thy measure, say thy word, reveal thy nullity or thy capacity. Come forth from the shade! It is no longer a question of promising, thou must perform. The time of apprenticeship is over. Servant, show us what thou hast done with thy talent. Speak now, or be silent forever." This appeal of the conscience is a solemn ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the life-blood seemed to ebb away from Ursula, and within the emptiness a heavy despair gathered. Her passion seemed to bleed to death, and there was nothing. She sat suspended in a state of complete nullity, ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... Sentiments denies the right of man to hold property in a brother man, affirms the identity in principle between the African slave trade and American slavery, the imprescriptibility of the rights of the slaves to liberty, the nullity of all laws which run counter to human rights, and the grand doctrine of civil and political equality in the Republic, regardless of race and complexional differences. It boldly rejects the principle of compensated emancipation, because it involves a surrender of the position ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... equity, except the possible inconvenience of changing from one creamery to another. The straight and honorable patron is powerless; the owner of the creamery is powerless; and the co-operative element is rendered a nullity. ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 1, January 5, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... to me the poor privilege of complaint. And I do complain. I complain that law and justice have been alike violated in my regard—I complain that the much belauded attribute 'British fair play' has been for me a nullity—I complain that the pleasant fiction described in the books as 'personal freedom' has had a most unpleasant illustration in my person—and I furthermore and particularly complain that by the design and ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... of the personality of the artist. You may have heard a play twenty times with indifference, or a melody as often, only to be bored by it; some fine day a great actor relieves the drama of its chill, its apparent nullity; the commonplace melody takes to itself wings beneath the magic of a well-trained, expressive and sympathetic voice. Delsarte possessed this artistic talent to a supreme degree, and it was one of the remarkable parts of his instruction; he had established typical phrases, where the mere shade of ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... settled the controversy by deciding that the resignation was an invalid act, and that Mr. Hastings was still in the legal possession of his place, which had been actually filled up in England. It was extraordinary that the nullity of this resignation should not have been discovered in England, where the act authorizing the resignation then was, where the agent was personally present, where the witnesses were examined, and where there was and could be no ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VIII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... such a case in instances where a man has abducted a minor, and induced her to contract a marriage with himself. The lady may not have been reluctant; but the marriage has been annulled, and the husband has been criminally prosecuted, the nullity of the marriage not availing to save him from conviction and punishment. A bigamous marriage is invalid, but the bigamist is punished. And, apart from any purely legal consideration, it may be ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... people, and he added some words, by which it was easily understood that the king's authority had to be superior to Guillaume de Caen's commissions. Pont-Grave replied at once: "I see that you believe in the nullity of my commission!" "Yes," replied Champlain, "when it comes in conflict with the king's and the viceroy's authority." This petty dispute had no serious consequence, as it was evident that Pont-Grave, being only the first ...
— The Makers of Canada: Champlain • N. E. Dionne
... Then, if they could get things right, they could marry; but he would not marry unless he could feel strong in the joy of it—never. He could not have faced his mother. It seemed to him that to sacrifice himself in a marriage he did not want would be degrading, and would undo all his life, make it a nullity. He would try what he ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... my pashints? Ay, ye may lauch, Miss Julee, but wait till ye see them." He was then seized with a fit of candour, and admitted that some, even of his pashints, were colourless; indeed, not to mince the matter, six or seven of that sacred band were nullity in person. "I can compare the beggars to nothing," said he, "but the globules of the Do-Nothings; dee——d insipid, and nothing in 'em. But the others make up. Man alive, I've got 'a rosy-cheeked miser,' and an 'ill-used attorney,' and an 'honest Screw'—he ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... several minutes, pointing out the various beauties in the architecture of the church to her guests, not that these individuals were very much interested in such matters, for they were of that particular social type which considers that the highest form of good breeding is to show a polite nullity of feeling concerning everything and everybody. They were eminently 'cultured,' which nowadays means pre-eminently dull. Had they been asked, they would have said that it is dangerous to express any opinion on any subject,—even on the ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... mankind, and in all his schemes he counted inconsistency among the passions, and panic among the virtues. He still hoped that Orange might be tempted by the prospect of immediate happiness to press for the nullity of the Parflete marriage. Parflete himself was indulging in the most extravagant demonstrations of remorse. He behaved, as Disraeli said, more like a cunning woman than an able man, and he was an agent of the kind most dangerous ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... that passed in this black nullity—he never could compute it—moments, doubtless, but it seemed hours, tried to the utmost the nerve of the entrapped trader, albeit inured by twenty years' experience to the capricious temper of the Cherokee Indians. He felt he could better endure the suspense could he only see his antagonist, ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... rejudge and reverse your decrees. You have said, 'The Congress shall have power to lay excises.' They say, 'The Congress shall not have this power;' or, what is equivalent, they shall not exercise it, for a power that may not be exercised is a nullity. Your representatives have said, and four times repeated it, 'An excise on distilled spirits shall be collected;' they say, 'It shall not be collected. We will punish, expel, and banish the officers who shall ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... Ronsard was never weary. However much one may tire of him, the fatigue never is infected by the nausea which is produced by some of the mechanical sonnet sequences of his contemporaries. No one reading Ronsard ever felt the tedium of mere nullity. It would be hard to find in the whole of M. van Bever's exhaustive edition of 'Les Amours'[9] a single piece which has not its sufficient charge of gusto. When you are tired, it is because you have had enough of that particular kind of man and mind; you know him too well, and can reckon ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... are entirely right," continued old Length-without-breadth; "A Lightning Conductor which does not conduct lightning, like a Leader who cannot lead, or a Follower who will not follow, is worse than a nullity, it is a nuisance and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 93, September 24, 1887 • Various
... that which Pitt recommended. He held that the British Parliament was not constitutionally competent to pass a law for taxing the colonies. He therefore considered the Stamp Act as a nullity, as a document of no more validity than Charles's writ of ship-money, or James's proclamation dispensing with the penal laws. This doctrine seems to us, we must own, to ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... horses and bets; and the literary man cannot hope to escape the usual fate of those who narrow their horizon. When a man once settles down as "literary" and nothing else, he does not take long in reaching complete nullity. His power of emitting strings of grammatical sentences remains; but the sentences are only exudations from an awful blankness—he is written out. The rush after money has latterly brought some of our most exquisite writers of fiction into a condition which is truly lamentable; ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... said, was put into the court to prove that the Nabob had no power or authority at all; but what is very singular in it, and which I recommend to the particular notice of your Lordships, when you are scrutinizing this matter, is, that there is not a single point stated, to prove the nullity of this Nabob's authority, that was not Mr. Hastings's on particular act. Well, the Governor-General swears; the judge of the court refers to him in his decision; he builds and bottoms it upon the Governor-General's ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke
... party contest between the ins and outs. The question was, whether the withering influence of the overseers, the domination of the churchwardens, and the blighting despotism of the vestry-clerk, should be allowed to render the election of beadle a form—a nullity: whether they should impose a vestry-elected beadle on the parish, to do their bidding and forward their views, or whether the parishioners, fearlessly asserting their undoubted rights, should elect an independent beadle of ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... mar the bliss of the man who has beside him the absolute sympathy of his feminine ideal, so on the other hand no worldly success of any kind can compensate for its absence. All particular causes of happiness or misery are swallowed up and sink into insignificance and nullity compared with this: this present, they disappear: this absent, each alone is sufficient to wreck the soul, fluttering about without rudder or ballast on the waves of the world. Duality is the root, out of which alone, for mortals, happiness can spring. And ...
— The Substance of a Dream • F. W. Bain
... like bees on that one proposition which had the honey of probability in it, and be the more eager because their enjoyment would end with sunset. Our impulses, our spiritual activities, no more adjust themselves to the idea of their future nullity, than the beating of our heart, or the ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... weaknesses, all this egotism, all these vices. Mirabeau was venal, Barnave jealous, Robespierre fanatic, the Jacobin Club blood-thirsty, the National Guard selfish, La Fayette a waverer, the government a nullity. No one desired the Revolution but for his own purpose, and according to his own scheme; and it must have been wrecked on these shoals a hundred times, if there were not in human crises something even stronger than the men who appear to guide ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... appointment.[546] In practice, appointment by the king has meant regularly appointment by the ministry commanding a majority in the lower chamber; and so easy and so effective has proved the process of "swamping" that the legislative independence of the Senate has been reduced almost to a nullity. In general it may be said that the body exercises the function of a revising, but no longer of an initiating or a checking, chamber. During the period 1861-1910 the government presented in the Chamber ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... of tea contains no more than the one-tenth of a grain of theine, still, if it contribute in point of fact to the formation of bile, the action even of such a quantity cannot be looked upon as a nullity. Neither can it be denied, that in the case of an excess of non-azotised food, and a deficiency of motion, which is required to cause the change of matter of the tissues, and thus to yield the nitrogenised product which enters into the composition of the bile, that in such a condition ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... On getting it, he would scan it, and request to get keeping it. In no shop was he refused, so that by the time he got to the end of the village, he was carrying two dozen large concert placards, while the tout, merrily whistling, and all unconscious of the nullity of his labours, was on his way back to Aberdeen. "Lead us not into temptation," said the minister, as he thrust the garish announcements into his study stove. None of Mr. Pollock's flock were at the concert that night. Perhaps, if any had gone, little harm would have been done. ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... I shall best bring out the force of these words by dealing first with that emphatic threefold proclamation of the nullity of all externalism; and then with the singular variations in the triple statement of what is essential, viz. spiritual ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... that concerning slavery, to the people. But, acting in an official character, neither myself nor any human authority had the power to rejudge the proceedings of the convention and declare the constitution which it had framed to be a nullity. To have done this would have been a violation of the Kansas and Nebraska act, which left the people of the Territory "perfectly free to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way, subject only to the Constitution of the United States." It would equally ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 4 (of 4) of Volume 5: James Buchanan • James D. Richardson
... State of Georgia, under which the plaintiff in error was prosecuted, is consequently void, and the judgment a nullity. Can this Court revise and ...
— Opinion of the Supreme Court of the United States, at January Term, 1832, Delivered by Mr. Chief Justice Marshall in the Case of Samuel A. Worcester, Plaintiff in Error, versus the State of Georgia • John Marshall
... Senate demanded the gravest thought. It was desired to avoid if possible the drowsy nullity of the Canadian Upper House and the preponderating "bossiness" of the American. Nor did the example of Australia, where the Senate, elected on a "general ticket" over huge provincial areas, becomes thereby ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... we know, was the affianced husband of Isabella Wardle, and to the scenes of their marriage, the festivities, &c., we owe some pleasing incidents. Trundle was a good specimen of the cypher or nullity; naturally, he is a figure at Manor Farm, but does nothing, and practically says nothing. He was clearly a neighbouring squire of limited ideas, or plain country gentlemen, that could do no more than love his Isabella. Yet, while Boz describes the "affairs" of ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald
... teachers, our dread of the ever present devil, and the reader will see that, under such conditions, nothing but strong self-will and a good share of hope and mirthfulness could have saved an ordinary child from becoming a mere nullity. ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... Carthusians in London had proved more submissive. There had been a struggle at first when the oath of the succession had been tendered to them, and Prior Houghton, with the Procurator, Humphrey Middlemore, had been committed to the Tower. The oath affirmed the nullity of Queen Katharine's marriage with the King on the alleged ground of her consummated marriage with Henry's elder brother, and involved, though the Carthusians did not clearly understand it so at the time, a rejection of the Pope's authority as connected with ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... such a way as to make action, or at least human action, a dispensable accident in the universe, an ineffective and unsubstantial unreality, while at the same time those who put it thus, profess to see through the illusion and to enjoy moments of insight which recognize its nullity. This way of putting it in my judgement intolerably misconceives ...
— Progress and History • Various
... with the spirit of change, nobody who takes his life or her life seriously, could allow an assumption which means reduction of one of the most important parts of character, the love of truth, to a nullity.] ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... to make it retroactive, and to violate this very law itself. Every day you have to reverse a decision because of some formal error. But there is not a single one of your laws that is not tainted with nullity, and the most monstrous nullity of all, the very hypothesis of the law. Soufflard, Lacenaire, all the scoundrels whom you send to the scaffold turn in their graves and accuse you of judicial forgery. What answer ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff
... of covert respect for the unobtrusive but terrible man whose hand was everywhere, even in the most distant corners of the earth, although he had never left his office. As Nani knew, despite his apparent nullity, Sarno, with his slow, methodical, ably organised work of conquest, possessed sufficient power to set empires ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... which had been produced by the counsels of the House of Stuart. In particular, he criticised the conduct of ministers with regard to Burke's economical plan of reform, which, he said, they were reducing to a nullity—to a thing naked and shorn, and useless to the country; and he expressed a hope that the people of England would resent the insults they had received from men who added mockery and contempt to oppression and neglect. Those who supported Dunning maintained that it was solely through the corrupt ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... might not shock the haughty claims of the pontiff, he resolved not to found the application on any general doubts concerning the papal power to permit marriage in the nearer degrees of consanguinity; but only to insist on particular grounds of nullity in the bull which Julius had granted for the marriage of Henry and Catharine. It was a maxim in the court of Rome, that if the pope be surprised into any concession, or grant any indulgence upon false suggestions, the bull may afterwards ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... the fact that Caesar brought good news, King Frederic gave his consent to the proposed union; so the marriage of Sforza and Lucrezia was dissolved on a pretext of nullity. Then Frederic authorised the exhumation of D'jem's body, which, it will be remembered, was worth ...
— The Borgias - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... through the windows of the church, by the call of the jackdaws nesting in the belfries. The region is a desert of stones, a solitude with a character of its own, an arid spot, which could only be inhabited by beings who had either attained to absolute nullity, or were gifted with some abnormal strength of soul. The house in question had always been occupied by abbes, and it belonged to an old maid named Mademoiselle Gamard. Though the property had been bought from the national domain under the ...
— The Vicar of Tours • Honore de Balzac
... marry her sister's husband. Besides she would have needed the Pope's dispensation for such a union—as Philip had already explained to her—while her birth and crown were the results of a Papal dispensation being declared a nullity. She would thus have fallen into a self-contradiction, to which she must have succumbed in course of time. When told that Philip II had done her some service, she acknowledged it: but when she meditated ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... What wheel it is you think you have sufficient vigour to stop, I am profoundly unaware, but I am prepared to affirm that it is not the wheel of my household. I would declare it, were I a plain citizen. You are a nullity in the case, in point of your individual will—a nullity swept away with one wave of the hand. You can do this, and nothing else: you can apologize, recognize your station, repair a degree of mischief that I ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... occasion for ecstasy. These formulations of the death idea may occur as tentative solutions of the patient's problems leading to temporary manic episodes while the psychosis is incubating. It seems that stupor as such appears only when death and nullity are accepted. ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... his preaching," writes another contemporary,[3183] "rarely culminated in any specific measure or legal provision. He combated everything and proposed nothing; the secret of his policy happily accorded with his intellectual impotence and with the nullity of his legislative conceptions." Once he has rattled his revolutionary pedantry off, he no longer knows what to say.—As to financial matters and military art, he knows nothing and risks nothing, except to underrate ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... history and an argument against idolatry. The glories of Greek art were around him; the statues of Pallas Athene and many more fair creations looked down on the little Jew who dared to proclaim their nullity as representations ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... as the Legislature had directed, but not made by the State, it would be equally invalid. Indeed, the Legislature may itself have given a direction in contravention of the State constitution, and thus the direction prove a nullity. So, too, the Legislature may have acted in contravention of the Federal Constitution, and for that reason its direction may have been void. The appointing power is the State, the manner of its action is prescribed by the Legislature; ...
— The Electoral Votes of 1876 - Who Should Count Them, What Should Be Counted, and the Remedy for a Wrong Count • David Dudley Field
... nothing but outward glory. Divines and ecclesiastical dignitaries began to concern themselves only about subduing the whole world to their authority, incited men against one another to murder and plunder, and in creed and life reduced Christianity to a nullity. Helchitsky denies completely the right to make war and to inflict the punishment of death; every soldier, even the 'knight,' is only ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... kind of magnificence may be attained in stories, professing to be epic, in which there is no dramatic virtue, in which every new scene and new adventure merely goes to accumulate, in immortal verse, the proofs of the hero's nullity and insignificance. This is not the epic poetry of ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... a clause in the treaty to the effect that Congress would recommend to the legislatures of the several States measures of restitution—a provision which turned out, as Franklin intimated at the time, a perfect nullity. The English Government subsequently {292} indemnified these people in a measure for their self-sacrifice, and among other things gave a large number of them valuable tracts of land in the provinces of British North America. Many of them settled in Nova Scotia, others ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... arrived that the Esmore with the 10th Hussars and a battalion of infantry on board had gone ashore at St. Helena, some 180 miles from Cape Town. Fortunately the men were rescued from the transport, but their chargers were all lost. This was a terrible blow, for at the time cavalry was almost a nullity, and operations were somewhat suspended, if not entirely crippled, owing to the lack of that arm. Indeed, Lord Methuen's brilliant operations on the Orange River had all been heavily handicapped owing to ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) - From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, - 15th Dec. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... Bayne found the fire newly alight in the hall, burning with that spare, clear brilliancy that the recent removal of ashes imparts to a wood fire. All the world was still beclouded with mists, and the windows and doors looked forth on a blank white nullity—as inexpressive, as enigmatical, as the unwritten page of the unformulated future itself. The present seemed eliminated; he stood as it were in the atmosphere of other days. But whither had blown the incense of that happy ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... that the situation of the Roman female, whether married or unmarried, became one of great personal and proprietary independence, for the tendency of the later law, as I have already hinted, was to reduce the power of the guardian to a nullity, while the form of marriage in fashion conferred on the husband no compensating superiority. But Christianity tended somewhat from the very first to narrow this remarkable liberty. Led at first by justifiable disrelish for the loose practices of the decaying heathen world, but afterwards ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... the injunction to respect other persons as such. Property is the external sphere which the will gives to itself; without property no personality. Through punishment (retaliation) right is restored against un-right (Unrecht), and the latter shown to be a nullity. The criminal is treated according to the same maxim as that of his action—that ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... suffered every thing with patience, making exercises of piety her chief occupation and comfort. Her husband coming to the crown of France in 1498, under the name of Louis XII., having in view an advantageous match with Anne, the heiress of Brittany, and the late king's widow, alleging also the nullity of his marriage with Jane, chiefly on account of his being forced to it by Louis XI., applied to pope Alexander VI. for commissaries to examine the matter according to law. These having taken cognizance of ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler |
