"Hollowness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... something that glimmers and twinkles and will not be caught, and for which reflection comes too late. No one knows this as well as the philosopher. He must fire his volley of new vocables out of his conceptual shotgun, for his profession condemns him to this industry, but he secretly knows the hollowness and irrelevancy. His formulas are like stereoscopic or kinetoscopic photographs seen outside the instrument; they lack the depth, the motion, the vitality. In the religious sphere, in particular, belief that formulas are true can never wholly take ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... however, I somehow entertained a belief that we had met before. Under what circumstances, or where, I could not recollect. The wistfulness of that white face, the slight hollowness of the cheeks, the unnaturally dark eyes, all seemed familiar to me; yet although for half an hour I strove to bring back to my mind where I had seen her, it was to no purpose. In all probability I had attended her at Guy's. A doctor in a big London hospital ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... weariness they scrape together enough for each day, going by mountain and wilderness seeking their food; so faint and enfeebled are they that their bowels cleave to their ribs, and all their body reechoes with hollowness, and they walk as people affrighted, the face and body in likeness of death. If they be merchants, they now sell only cakes ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... and in the end of Summer becometh hard and woody. Whether this be the very same kind, I cannot affirm, but both the Picture and Description come very neer to that I have, but that he seems not to take notice of the hollowness or Worm, for which 'tis most observable. And therefore 'tis very likely, if men did but take notice, they might find very many differing Species of these Nuts, Ovaries, or Matrixes, and all of them to have much the same designation and office. ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... stay there—keep just that way—it's what I want." He continued down the line, which had become hushed. "Now, people. I want some flashes along here, between dances—see what I mean? You're talking, but you're bored with it all. The hollowness of this night life is getting you; not all of you—most of you girls can keep on smiling—but The Blight of Broadway shows on many. You're beginning to wonder if this is all life has to offer—see what I mean?" ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... a naiad rising from the waves, to please every one who came near her, and to be happy that she pleased. I know not whether Ransom was aware of the bearings of this interpretation, which attributed to Miss Tarrant a singular hollowness of character; he contented himself with believing that she was as innocent as she was lovely, and with regarding her as a vocalist of exquisite faculty, condemned to sing bad music. How prettily, indeed, she made some of ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... ineffectual attempt to liberate the Fenian prisoners confined in it. On the 20th of December Matthew Arnold wrote to his mother, "We are in a strange uneasy state in London, and the profound sense I have long had of the hollowness and insufficiency of our whole system of administration does not inspire me with much confidence." The "strange uneasy state" was not confined to London, but prevailed everywhere. Obviously England was threatened by a mysterious and desperate enemy, and no one seemed to know that enemy's ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... 443; dream &c (imagination) 515; ignis fatuus &c (luminary) 423 [Lat.]; such stuff as dreams are made of [Tempest]; air, thin air, vapor; bubble &c 353; baseless fabric of a vision [Tempest]; mockery. hollowness, blank; void &c (absence) 187. inanity, fool's paradise. V. vanish, evaporate, fade, dissolve, melt away; disappear &c 449. Adj. unsubstantial; baseless, groundless; ungrounded; without foundation, having no foundation. visionary &c ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... were in turn destroyed. The assumption was rife at the end of the eighteenth century that Christianity was discredited in the minds of all free and reasonable men. Its tenets were incompatible with that which enlightened men infallibly knew to be true. It could be no long time until the hollowness and sham would be patent to all. Even the interested and the ignorant would be compelled to give it up. Of course, the invincibly devout in every nation felt of instinct that this was not true. They felt that there is an ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... silent; in truth, I found my tongue clinging to the roof of my mouth, and a dry, painful sensation in the throat. I observed a peculiar hollowness in Mudge's voice, too, and I was conscious that my own also sounded unusual. Still it would not do to give in, and we were not so far gone yet as to think of doing that. On, therefore, we went, ...
— Twice Lost • W.H.G. Kingston
... from one foot to the other. A sickening feeling of hollowness within him was crying aloud to be appeased by either food or drink, and his shaking body begged for a place to rest itself into tranquillity; but still for a while he stood there, fighting off these ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... also a staunch believer in forced labour, which was quite a different thing. Consequently we found ourselves condemned to some of the most filthy tasks conceivable. Incidentally, however, these duties only served to reveal still more convincingly the hollowness of Germany's preachings concerning the principles of health and hygiene to the whole world while herself practising the diametrically opposite. We were commanded to clean out ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... {arkhe} is a tinkling cymbal and empire no burthen to be borne. His feeling for the sweetness of home || modern. In this the secret of his happiness, || hgd. (b) His justification or raison d'etre explanation of the eunuch system. Why doesn't he point out its hollowness also? Not from any lack of sympathy with this barren mankind. Cf. Gadatas. I think this all logically follows if the {arkhon} is to rule political enemies as well as friends: to do so {epistamenos} ["asian expert"] some strange devices must be resorted to—what ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... line of fortified posts, and with the river steamers, which would result in cutting off the slave hunters from their best source of supply. The expression of his plans in his earnest manner showed up by contrast the hollowness of the views and policy of those who had obtained his services. In his own graphic and emphatic way he wrote: "I thought the thing real and found it a sham, and felt like a Gordon who has been humbugged." He found Cairo "a regular hot-bed of intrigues," ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume I • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... are very poetic in their arrangement of words and phrases, and are usually divided into short sections or paragraphs by the use of red ink for the first sentence of each. Such is the Instruction of Ptah-hotep on morality (the finest of its class); the Instruction of King Amenemhe'et on the hollowness of friendship and other matters; the Instruction of Deu'of, the son of Kherti, on the excellence of the literary life; and others. In many respects and in many details they greatly resemble the didactic works of the Old Testament ...
— The Instruction of Ptah-Hotep and the Instruction of Ke'Gemni - The Oldest Books in the World • Battiscombe G. Gunn
... third figure will be a demonstration of the bones of the backparts. Then I will make three other figures from the same point of view, with the bones sawn across, in which will be shown their thickness and hollowness. Three other figures of the bones complete, and of the nerves which rise from the nape of the neck, and in what limbs they ramify. And three others of the bones and veins, and where they ramify. Then three figures with the muscles and three ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... by local color, in all these beautiful traditions of whatever nation or clime; at the zenith of success, in the spring-time of youth and hope, on the very eve of joy unutterable, there often seizes on the soul of man an overwhelming sense of the hollowness and fleetingness of life. It is this touch of the spiritual which raises these old heroic poems to such sublime beauty and power. Poetry of this kind implies a nation, one which is still, or has been, great; one which has a past, a legendary history, vivid recollections, ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... going away sorrowful, and so should His messengers do. The sorrow tells of real desire, and the departure will sooner or later be exchanged for return with a deeper and more thorough purpose, if the earlier wish had any substance in it. If it had not, better that the consciousness of its hollowness should be forced upon the man, than that he should outwardly become what he is not really,—a Christian; for, in the one case, he may be led to reflection which may issue in thorough surrender; and in the other he will be a self- deceived deceiver, and probably ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... thy hollowness On our full feast. Famine is fear, were it but Of being starved. Sit down, sit down, and eat, And, when again red-blooded, speak again; (Aside.) The men that guarded England to the South Were scatter'd to the harvest.... ...
— Queen Mary and Harold • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... was exterminated. Alone in the world, he was sighing bitterly, when he awoke with a start. All had taken place in so short a space of time that Han Chung-li's wine was not yet hot. This is the incident referred to in Chinese literature in the phrase 'rice-wine dream.' Convinced of the hollowness of worldly dignities, he followed Han Chung-li to the Ho Ling Mountains at Chung-nan in Shensi, where he was initiated into the divine mysteries, ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... had accustomed her mind to dwell on things beyond life, and life itself had little interest for her. This was because she had been set among the shams of worldly state and ceremonial from her earliest years, and being of a profound and thoughtful nature, had grown up to utterly despise the hollowness and hypocrisy of her surroundings. In extenuation of the coldness of her temperament, it may be said that her rooted aversion to men arose from having studied them too closely and accurately. In her marriage she had fulfilled, or thought she had fulfilled, a mere duty to the State—no ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... start the grey forward to the north. For to the south lay Sally Fortune, and at the thought of her a singular hollowness came about his heart, a loneliness, not for himself, but for her. Yes, in a strange way all self was blotted from ...
— Trailin'! • Max Brand
... the union in one of what to smaller people appears entirely and absolutely antagonistic, of utmost scientific scepticism and highest spiritual faith and worth. "He was filled full with the scepticism, bitterness, hollowness, and thousandfold contradictions of his time, till his heart was like to break; yet he subdued all this, rose victorious over this, and manifoldly, by word and act, showed others that came after ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... in his robes and coronet—the beadle in his gaudy livery of scarlet, and purple, and gold—the dignitary in the fulness of his pomp—the demagogue in the triumph of his hollowness—these and other visual and oral cheats by which mankind are cajoled, have passed in review before us, conjured up by the ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 1, July 17, 1841 • Various
... thus it will be: You see a tremendous tower-like pine-tree in the forest; it seems as it will stand there forever; but strike it fairly with your axe and it will reveal hollowness and punk will come out. So is it with the strength of the Knights of the Cross. But I commanded you to tell me what you have done and what you have accomplished there. Let me see, you said you fought there with weapons, did ...
— The Knights of the Cross • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... us a tear when we should utter a reproach? Thy punishment; that bitter, miserable end; that long battling with poverty, debt, disease, all brought on by thyself; that abandonment in the hour of need, more bitter than them all; that awakening to the terrible truth of the hollowness of man and rottenness of the world!—surely this is enough: surely we may hope that a pardon followed. But now let us view thee in thy upward flight the genius, the wit, ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... on earth. It has come, this ethical Church, to reinforce the wholly forgotten teaching of the Hebrew prophets of the utter emptiness of all religion devoid of moral life, the vanity of sacrifices, oblations and rites, the hollowness of formularies, creeds and confessions, the indispensable necessity of an ethical basis for all religious belief and practice. "What more," asks Micah, "doth the Lord require of thee than to do justice, love mercy, and to walk ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... for twenty-five years. None of these are Home Rulers. I became a convert to Conservatism by my intimate knowledge and personal acquaintance with many of the leaders of the Fenian movement. I saw through the hollowness of the whole thing, and declined any connection therewith. Poor Henry Rowles, who was to be told off by signal to shoot Mr. Foster, was one of my workmen. He died in prison, some said from sheer fright, but two or three of his friends were ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... public, I have often accused that body of having no sense of humour. Conscience pricks me to atonement. Let me withdraw my oft-made imputation, and show its hollowness by examining with you, reader (who are, of course, no more a member of the public than I am), what are the main features of that sense of humour which the public ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... brain-distorting puzzledom: for puzzles, as I have elsewhere said, come in rattle-boxes, they are actually children's toys, for what they contain, but not the less do they buzz at our understandings and insist that they break or we, and, in either case, to show a mere foolish idle rattle in hollowness. Nor have ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, December 19, 1891 • Various
... precipice of affliction—even while its current, though nearing the abyss, flow softly as "the waters of Shiloah." It may be the death of a mother, whom the bereaved half deemed immortal—some disappointment, like the falsehood of one dearly loved—some rude shock, as the discovery of a day-dream's hollowness; happy, thrice happy! if it be but one of these, and not the ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... common enemy of the Faith, was it likely to combine against one who, in spite of all his enormities, was still an orthodox Christian? And, without a combination of princes to execute them, papal censures, excommunications, interdicts, and all the spiritual paraphernalia, served only to probe the hollowness of papal pretensions, and to demonstrate the deafness of Europe to the calls of religious enthusiasm. In Spain, at least, it might have been thought that every sword would leap from its scabbard at a summons (p. 313) from Charles on behalf ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... second-selves—women young, modest, sincere, pure in heart and life, with feelings all fresh and emotions all unworn, and bind such virtue and vitality to their own withered existence, such sincerity to their own hollowness, such disinterestedness to their own haggard avarice—to think this, troubles the soul to its inmost depths. Nature and justice forbid the banns of ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... not be termed anything but a reverse. In vain did the commander and his staff proclaim that, after dispersing the Turks at Mount Tabor, the capture of Acre was superfluous; his desperate efforts in the early part of May revealed the hollowness of his words. There were, it is true, solid reasons for his retreat. He had just heard of the breaking out of the war of the Second Coalition against France; and revolts in Egypt also demanded his presence.[116] But these last events furnished a damning commentary on his whole Syrian ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... never in his life feared any living thing. But now there was a certain hollowness in the region of his stomach, and his heart fluttered like a bird in the air, with appalling lightness. And he wished to be ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... to find encouraging words. I talked with him, holding him by the hand and patting him affectionately on the shoulder; but my voice had in my own ears the empty hollowness of deceit, and Miraz, looking at me, ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... have I tried, and I am weary of the hollowness, weary of life, and the world. So long as I have your face here, I care not to cross my own threshold till friendly hands bear me out to my quiet resting-place under the willows of Greenwood. Electra, my darling, think me weak if you will, but bear ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... saw it, he says, "I saw the unfortunate condition of all mankind, especially of my own countrymen, in all its hollowness. I saw indulgence despoiling the highest moral, spiritual, and civil interests, and sapping the lifeblood of our race as never before in the history of Europe. I saw finally the people of our nation steeped in poverty, misery, and universal want. From youth ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... and spelling, the terse thought, and the concise form, are all characteristic of Napoleon. The right of petition, the recital of unjust acts, the illegal action of the council, the use of force, the hollowness of the pretexts under which their request had been refused, the demand that the troops be withdrawn and redress granted—all these are crudely but forcibly presented. The document presages revolution. Under a well-constituted and ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... and go by his advice still; and in his best consideration recall this hideous rashness: for he would answer with his life, his judgment that Lear's youngest daughter did not love him least, nor were those empty-hearted whose low sound gave no token of hollowness. When power bowed to flattery, honour was bound to plainness. For Lear's threats, what could he do to him, whose life was already at his service? That should not ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... the wrecks of his drama on Liberty prove, felt the might of the ideal of the Third Age with all the vibrating emotion which genius imparts.[6] But he was the first to discover its hollowness, and bade the world, in epigram or in prose tale, in lyric or in drama, to seek its peace where he himself had found it, in Art. So the labour of the scientific theorist, negatively beneficent by the impulsion of man's spirit beyond science, brings ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... won't be fine—it will pour!" said Elsie gloomily, and wagged her head in the hopeless manner of one who has tasted deeply of the world, and knew its hollowness by heart. If there was by chance a cheerful and a melancholy view to be taken on any subject, Elsie invariably chose the melancholy one, and gloated over it with ghoulish enjoyment. She was never so happy as when she was miserable,—as an Irishman would have had it,—and ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... the lamentations which ascend from earth and the rebellious heart of her children, upon this huge opprobrium of human pride—the everlasting mutabilities of all which man can grasp by his power or by his aspirations, the fragility of all which he inherits, and the hollowness visible amid the very raptures of enjoyment to every eye which looks for a moment underneath the draperies of the shadowy present—the hollowness—the blank treachery of hollowness, upon which all the ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... the end of the tyrant. Death ends his tyranny, as it does, for the time being at least, the misery of those who were under it. Men follow him to his burial, to the holy place, return to their usual avocations—all is over and forgotten. The splendor and power of monarchy now show their hollowness and vanity by so quickly disappearing, and even their memory vanishing, at the touch of death. And yet this retributive end is by no means speedy in every case. Sentence is often deferred, and the delay emboldens the heart ...
— Old Groans and New Songs - Being Meditations on the Book of Ecclesiastes • F. C. Jennings
... all felt the brazenness of words without emotion, the hollowness, the unaccountable unpersuasiveness of eloquence behind which lies no love. The Greatest Thing ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond
... he told them off, however, the old sense of hollowness was upon him again. His life there reminded him of a gaudy drop-scene, let down before an empty stage; a painted sham, with darkness and vacuity behind. At bottom, none of these distinctions and successes meant anything to him; not a scrap of ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... consistency, of common humanity. The girl was miserably poor, and had aged parents and brothers and sisters dependent on her exertions; but her Christian employer paid her the lowest possible price, and trampled on her feelings as though she had been a brute. Oh, the hollowness of the religion I saw practiced! I sneered at everything connected with churches, and heard no more sermons, which seemed only to make hypocrites and pharisees of the congregation. I have never known but one exception. Mrs. Asbury is a consistent Christian. ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... Greece in the autumn of 1828, he was coldly received and his offers of further service, though not openly rejected, were not accepted. Throughout ten weeks he was treated with contemptuous indifference, or formal compliments, the hollowness of which was transparent. On his arrival, the President found it difficult to grant him an interview. When that interview was granted, the only subject allowed to be discussed was the accuracy of the accounts that had been drawn up by Dr. Gosse as Commissary-General of the Fleet, during the ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, Vol. II • Thomas Lord Cochrane
... inanimate, even to sulkiness, are the prim little Parsee maidens, who often wear an "exercised" expression, of a settled sort, as though they were weary of reflecting on the hollowness of the world, and how their dolls are stuffed with sawdust, and that Dakhma, the Tower of Silence, is the end of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... advanced with the old wilful shake of his curly head. "I also would rather walk, if you please." As he looked at him, compassion came into the Etheling's face. The hollowness of their sockets made the boy's large eyes look larger, and his fever-flush trebled their brightness. Sebert said, with a poor attempt at a smile, "Little did I think that my hospitality would ever produce such a guest. Poor youngling! You would better have crept out ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... Beethoven's overture "Leonore No. 3," we marvel at the transformation effected by the composer. Advantage has also been taken of the difference between its high and low tones, and now in some romantic music, as in Raff's "Lenore" symphony, or the prayer of Agathe in "Der Freischuetz," the hollowness of the low tones produces a mysterious effect that is exceedingly striking. Still the fact remains that the native voice of the instrument, though sweet, is expressionless compared with that of the oboe or clarinet. Modern composers sometimes write for three flutes; but in the older writers, when ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... me smile again: he asked me the cause, and I answered that his observation reminded me of the story of a lady offering her condolence to a poor Irishwoman on the death of her child, who stated that she had never been more affected than on the event; the poor woman, knowing the hollowness of the compliment, answered with all the quickness of her country, "Sure, then, Ma'am, that is saying a great deal, for you were always affected." Lord Byron laughed, and said my apropos was very wicked—but I maintained it was very just. He spoke much more warmly of Moore's social attractions ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 556., Saturday, July 7, 1832 • Various
... the flight to Palermo, the condition of affairs for the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was seemingly critical to the verge of desperation; for neither the preparations of the Coalition, nor the hollowness of the French successes, were understood, and news was slow to reach the remote city where the Court now dwelt. The republican movement extended, though superficially, to the toe of Italy, many of the towns in Calabria planting the tree of liberty, and the new flag flying on the islands along ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... spokes unite in the one nave; but it is on the empty space (for the axle), that the use of the wheel depends. Clay is fashioned into vessels; but it is on their empty hollowness, that their use depends. The door and windows are cut out (from the walls) to form an apartment; but it is on the empty space (within), that its use depends. Therefore, what has a (positive) existence ...
— Tao Teh King • Lao-Tze
... is the hand of Prussianism which offers this peace to America. As long ago as last June you exposed the hollowness of peace offered under such conditions as are now set forth by the German Chancellor. Referring to the German Government, you said: "It wishes to close its bargain before it is too late and it has little left to offer for the pound of flesh ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... setting fire to it; so he gave order that the soldiers should throw a great number of burning torches upon it: accordingly, as it was chiefly made of wood, it soon took fire; and when it was once set on fire, its hollowness made that fire spread to a mighty flame. Now, at the very beginning of this fire, a north wind that then blew proved terrible to the Romans; for by bringing the flame downward, it drove it upon them, and they were ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus
... with his "Unknowable"—the creation of which was the worst day's work he ever accomplished. It is only a big word, printed with a capital letter, to express the objective side of the relativity of human, knowledge. It connotes all that we do not know. It is a mere confession of ignorance; it is hollowness, emptiness, a vacuum, a nothing. And this nothing, which Mr. Spencer adorns with endless quasi-scientific rhetoric, is used as a buttress to prop up ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... affairs in order. All the time Ethel said not a word, except when referred to by her brother; but when Mr. Wilmot took leave, he shook her hand warmly, as if he was much pleased with her. "Ah!" she thought, "if he knew how ill I have behaved! It is all show and hollowness with me." ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... alternate sides, with four thin buttress-like projections on each face. These provide the slight entasis to the outline which is found in so many spires, as it is in classic columns, and is designed to correct the appearance of hollowness which would occur in so long a straight line. The upper two-thirds of the spire has triple angle rolls, and, just halfway in the total height, are eight canopied panels of which four are pierced. The beauty of the steeple and its ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Churches of Coventry - A Short History of the City and Its Medieval Remains • Frederic W. Woodhouse
... laugh at the snapped cord, I ask you to take my lute in your hands and fill its hollowness ...
— The Fugitive • Rabindranath Tagore
... that she was slow to forget. It was not that she resented the assertion of authority. She had the fairness to admit his right, but in a very subtle fashion it hurt her. It made her feel more than ever the hollowness of the bargain, to which he had made such grim allusion. It added, moreover, to her uneasiness, making her suspect that he was fully as dissatisfied as she. Yet, in face of the stony front he presented she could not continue to proffer her friendship. He ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... dissatisfied with my work at the theatre. On the one hand, the members of the company became gradually more distasteful to me, and on the other I was growing discontented with the management. With regard to the staff of the theatre, I very soon found out the hollowness, vanity, and the impudent selfishness of this uncultured and undisciplined class of people, for I had now lost my former liking for the Bohemian life that had such an attraction for me at Magdeburg. Before long there were but a few ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... where Bryce stood guard. This wood he flung into the mouth of the lair, started the fire with his flint and steel, and when the flames began to wreathe the branches hungrily, he flung on leaves and grass to make a "smudge." His suspicions regarding the hollowness of the tree proved true, for the draft through the hollow hole acted like a chimney and sucked the smoke upward. It began to wreathe out between the first limbs, some thirty feet ...
— With Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga • W. Bert Foster
... such thoughts are, they are not all the truth. So the prayer changes in tone, even while its substance is the same. He rises from the shows of earth to his true home, driven thither by their hollowness. "My hope is in Thee." The conviction of earth's vanity is all different when it has "tossed him to Thy breast." The pardoned sinner, who never thereafter forgot his grievous fall, asks for deliverance "from all his transgressions." The sullen silence has changed ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... of import, unfolded themselves before him. On the other hand, such dogmas of the Church as he found to have no warrant in Scripture, nor to harmonise with the Scriptural doctrine of salvation, frequently faded from his notice, and perished even before he was fully conscious of their hollowness. The new knowledge had ripened with him before the old husk was ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... large hands, long legs, and big feet. A giant physically—and yet somehow he gave the impression of excessive gauntness and about his face there dwelt a strange impression of sadness and spiritual anguish. The hollowness of his cheeks accented by his swarthy ...
— The Southerner - A Romance of the Real Lincoln • Thomas Dixon
... and some brave silences that were wholly pathetic, and then the hour for Rupert's departure all too suddenly arrived. They separated with ostentatious whooping, and then Johnny, suddenly overcome with the dreadfulness of all earthly things, and the hollowness of life generally, ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... the highest cliff; I hear the sound Of dashing waves; I gaze intent around; I mark the gray cope, and the hollowness Of heaven, and the great sun, that comes to bless The isles again; but my long-straining eye, No speck, no shadow can, far off, descry, That I might weep tears of delight, and say, It is the bark that bore my child away! Sun, that returnest bright, beneath whose eye The ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... reason of the war, then going on between the pope and the king of Sicily, the party at last reached Beneventum. The trial that took place lasted several days; when the result of the pleadings for and against was, that Adrian became convinced of the hollowness of the accusations, laid by the patriarch against the knights of St. John, and, therefore, refused to grant the redress sought for,—namely, to annul the patent of privileges conferred by Anastasius. William of Tyre,—who describes the transaction as a partisan of the patriarch,—plainly ...
— Pope Adrian IV - An Historical Sketch • Richard Raby
... more stubborn in her resentment. He bore this state of things for about a week, when his engagements to lecture in Ohio suddenly called him away. Abel and Miss Ringtop were left to wander about the promontory in company, and to exchange lamentations on the hollowness of human hopes or the pleasures of despair. Whether it was owing to that attraction of sex which would make any man and any woman, thrown together on a desert island, finally become mates, or whether she skilfully ministered to Abel's sentimental vanity, I will not undertake ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... a shy, unaccustomed endearment. Gordon was stereotyped, commonplace; he was certain that even she must recognize the hollowness of his protestations. But she never doubted him; she accepted the dull, leaden note of his spurious passion for the clear ring of unalloyed and ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... drew much courage from Charteris, who had been a prisoner a long time in Quebec, and who understood even more thoroughly than young Lennox the hollowness of the French power ...
— The Sun Of Quebec - A Story of a Great Crisis • Joseph A. Altsheler
... was a presidential year and the air was thick with politics. Mark Twain was no longer actively interested in the political situation; he was only disheartened by the hollowness and pretense of office-seeking, and the methods of office-seekers in general. Grieved that Twichell should still pin his faith to any party when all parties were so obviously venal and time-serving, he wrote in outspoken and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... apparently forgot her existence, and she was left to battle with the heavy change alone. It was impossible for them all to live together now, and the mother felt that if Arthur left her, Gillian, too, must go to learn the ways of that world, of the hollowness and falseness of which ...
— The Brother Clerks - A Tale of New-Orleans • Xariffa
... unscrupulously violated the treaty of Zurich, and who was, besides, the chief hero of Gaeta, Naples, Castelfidardo and Ancona. One of the most eloquent of Bishop Dupanloup's publications, the one which, perhaps, has been the most generally read, exposes the hollowness of this arrangement, which is known in ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... do, Scythrop. There is a girl concealed in this tower, and find her I will. There are such things as sliding panels and secret closets.'—He sounded round the room with his cane, but detected no hollowness.—'I have heard, sir,' he continued, 'that during my absence, two years ago, you had a dumb carpenter closeted with you day after day. I did not dream that you were laying contrivances for carrying on secret intrigues. Young men will have their way: I had my way when I was a young ...
— Nightmare Abbey • Thomas Love Peacock
... a pity," she returned to his surprise very quietly; and without looking at him, she spoke presently in a voice which struck him as having a strange quality of hollowness, "it was a pity; but it can't be helped. You might try and try because you're made that way, but it wouldn't, in the end, do the very least bit of good. If I live till to-morrow and get well and come out of the hospital, it will all be over ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... already," said the warm-hearted old Chevalier, "one whom I love. There is something frank in your eyes which raises memories of my dead son. In you I see both my offspring's and my own youth recalled to me. You are Canadian—in you I can banish the coldness, hollowness, and degeneracy of Europe. Replace my boy. Let me call ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... the golden silence of the Dark Ages and be talking all the time. And surely the hourly failure to act up to your principles, the hourly and conscious apostacy from your ideal, could beget nothing in the character but hollowness and weakness. No student of history can fail to see the moral interest of the Middle Ages, any more than an artist can fail to see their aesthetic interest. There were some special types of noble ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... neighbourhood of Newport, which is in the district of Gwentluc, {78} there is a small stream called Nant Pencarn, {79} passable only at certain fords, not so much owing to the depth of its waters, as from the hollowness of its channel and muddy bottom. The public road led formerly to a ford, called Ryd Pencarn, that is, the ford under the head of a rock, from Rhyd, which in the British language signifies a ford, Pen, the head, and Cam, a rock; of which place Merlin Sylvester had thus prophesied: "Whenever ...
— The Itinerary of Archibishop Baldwin through Wales • Giraldus Cambrensis
... ends of providence has been endowed with a subtle power of fraud such as no man can thoroughly look through; for those who, like myself, despise it most completely, cannot by any art bring forward a rationale, a theory of its hollowness that will give plenary satisfaction except to those who are already satisfied). Thus Cicero, feeling that if this were nothing, then had all his life been a skirmish, one continued skirmish for shadows and nonentities; a feeling of blank desolation, too ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... how common!), the truth come too late—if the tomb is closed—if the heart you have wrung can be wrung no more—why the truth is as valueless as the epitaph on a forgotten Name! Some such conviction of the hollowness of his own words, when he spoke of service to the dead, smote upon Philip's heart, and stopped the ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 5 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... in this country, the extravagant length of 200 millions of miles.[292] It was narrow, and bounded by nearly parallel and nearly rectilinear lines, resembling—to borrow a comparison of Aristotle's—a "road" through the constellations; and after the 3rd of March showed no trace of hollowness, the axis being, in fact, rather brighter than the edges. Distinctly perceptible in it were those singular aurora-like coruscations which gave to the "tresses" of Charles V.'s comet the appearance—as Cardan described it—of "a torch agitated by the wind," and have not unfrequently been observed ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... to the artist? What fell words were those, expressive of what a galling hollowness, of what a bitter mockery! I—I—I—am the artist. I was the real artist of Piccadilly, I was the real artist of the Waterloo Road, I am the only artist of all those pavement-subjects which daily and nightly arouse your admiration. I do 'em, and I let 'em out. The man you ...
— Somebody's Luggage • Charles Dickens
... compact; arms and limbs relatively short; her haunches apart; her hips elevated; her abdomen large and her thighs voluminous. Hence, she should taper from the center, up and down. Whereas, in a well-formed man the shoulders are more prominent than the hips. Great hollowness of the back, the pressing of the thigh against each other in walking, and the elevation of one hip above the other, are indications of the malformation of ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... strode from his father's door that day stung with a burning sense of wrong and injustice. More than ever before in his life he realized to himself the abject hollowness of that conventional code which masquerades in our midst as a system of morals. If he had continued to "live single" as we hypocritically phrase it, and so helped by one unit to spread the festering social canker of prostitution, on which as basis, like some mediaeval castle ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... depends on how it was said. If the Lord Chancellor ever said to Raleigh, 'To take the Mexico fleet would be piracy,' it would have been just like Raleigh to give such an answer. The speech is a perfectly true one: Raleigh knew the world, no man better; and saw through its hollowness, and the cant and hypocrisy of his generation; and he sardonically states an undeniable fact. He is not expressing his own morality, but that of the world; just as he is doing in that passage of his 'Apology,' about which I must complain of Mr. Napier. 'It was a maxim of his,' says Mr. Napier, ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... the uninitiated an outline of the stage paraphernalia of the Inferno. It has an encyclopaedic value. If Dante himself had been the high director in the plenitude of his resources, it might still have had that hollowness. A list of words making a poem and a set of apparently equivalent pictures forming a photoplay may have an entirely different outcome. It may be like trying to see a perfume or listen to a taste. ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... and rattled itself into an inert mass at the base of the incline. Yellow dust like the gloom of the cave, but not so changeless, drifted away on the wind; the roar clapped in echo from the cliff, returned, went back, and came again to die in the hollowness. Down on the sunny terrace there was a different atmosphere. Ring and Whitie leaped around Bess. Once more she was smiling, gay, and thoughtless, with the dream-mood in ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... for a girl that even in her humble station was far beyond his hopes, and I pitied myself in him. Home, fortune, friends, I no longer cared for—all were forgotten. And now they are returning to me—only that I may see the hollowness and vanity of them, and taste the bitterness for which I have sacrificed you. And here, on this last night of my exile, I am confronted with only the jealousy, the doubt, the meanness and selfishness that is to come. Too late! ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... had been smooth and uneventful; he had yet to test the hollowness of human happiness, to learn that the highest sort of life is not merely to be cradled in luxury and to fare sumptuously every day. The purple and fine linen are good enough in their way, and the myrrh and the aloes and the cassia, but what does the ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... with a disappointed air, whose hollowness was proved by her rising redness and her half-guilty low laugh. ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... brought to see the hollowness of the contention that 'Pure Reason' can ignore its psychological context and dehumanize itself. A thought, to be thought at all, must seem worth thinking to someone, it must convey the meaning he intends, it must be true ...
— Pragmatism • D.L. Murray
... dense, so lacking in spiritual vision, so dumb and so beast-like that it does not know the difference between a thief and the only Begotten Son. In a frantic effort to forget its hollowness it takes to ping-pong, parchesi and progressive euchre, and seeks to lose itself and find ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... demanded Mrs. Luce, her voice hollow with the hollowness of the prophet. "No one knows the day and the hour when we are to be swept up. It is near at hand. We shall ride triumphant to the skies. And will any one think of property and the vain things of this ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... judgment Galileo remained in Rome, apparently hoping to find some way out of this difficulty; but he soon discovered the hollowness of the protestations made to him by ecclesiastics, and, being recalled to Florence, remained in his hermitage near the city in silence, working steadily, indeed, but not publishing anything save by private letters to friends in ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... miserable women looking down at their puny nursing babies with such unutterable bliss on their faces that I've nearly cried for pure joy and sympathy. But in my heart all the time I felt that this was weakness and folly; that what was bliss to the mother, stupefying her for a while to the hollowness and emptiness of her existence, was the beginning of a probable life of misery to the child that could end only with death. And I have vowed to myself that never should child of mine have cause to reproach me for selfishness that takes ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... through the leafy woods, trundling the basket behind him. Nothing had gone wrong; indeed, everything had been much easier than he could have hoped. Perhaps it was the weariness that had crept into his legs, and the hollowness that began to appear in his stomach; but, somehow, although in the morning he had expected to find Gay's new mothers beckoning from every window, so that he could scarcely choose between them, he now felt as if the whole race of ...
— Timothy's Quest - A Story for Anybody, Young or Old, Who Cares to Read It • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... wings. So that we have not to banish from the ideal countenance the evidences of sorrow, nor of past suffering, nor even of past and conquered sin, but only the immediate operation of any evil, or the immediate coldness and hollowness of any good emotion. And hence in that contest before noted, between the body and the soul, we may often have to indicate the body as far conquered and outworn, and with signs of hard struggle and bitter pain upon it, and yet without ever diminishing the purity of its ideal; and because it is ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... yourself have heard, is very contracted and poor, without inflection or expression, being nothing but the repetition of the same sounds, by which means—that is simply by the number and the depth of hollowness of the same monosyllables—they convey their wishes to each other. It is, indeed, wonderful how they can do so, and our learned men, from this circumstance, have held that the language of the wood-pigeon is the most ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... expressed my great obligation to him; on which you said that I could prove my gratitude, if I chose, to his widow,—which choice I then not accepting, have ever since remembered the circumstance as one peculiarly likely to add, so far as it went, to the general impression on your mind of the hollowness of people's sayings and hardness of their hearts. The fact is, I give what I give almost in an opposite way to yours. I think there are many people who will relieve hopeless distress for one who will help at a hopeful pinch; and when I have the choice ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... of the Peace of Utrecht, or to abandon his desire for the Hanoverian succession. Distrusting the sincerity of Harley's pretended exertions, he resolutely refused to hold intercourse with a Minister of whose hollowness he had already received many proofs. Nor was the Duchess less determined never to pardon the injuries which she conceived herself and her husband to have sustained from Harley. All offers of his aid, all attempts to lend to him the influence which Marlborough's ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... houses of the country are everywhere built of beams of fir-trees; the lower beams do so receive the round hollowness of the uppermost, that by the means of the building thereupon they resist and expel all winds that blow, and where the timber is joined together, there they stop the chinks with moss. The form and fashion of their houses in all places is four-square, with straight and narrow ...
— The Discovery of Muscovy etc. • Richard Hakluyt
... him, with the suddenness and the shock of an electric current, as a radiating tingle of nerves, followed by a strangely sickening sense of hollowness about the chest, swept through his body. Could it be Frank herself in danger, ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... happy," said the proud mother; "you will now be all I have ever predicted for you;" and, in her joy at the moment, she forgot the hectic of his cheek, and the hollowness ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... in a letter to Allsop (Conversations, etc., i. 20) approves one of Cobbett's articles, because it popularises the weighty truth of the 'hollowness of commercial wealth.' Cobbett, he sadly reflects, is an overmatch for Liverpool. See Cobbett's Political ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... prevarication, equivocation, shuffling, fencing, evasion, fraud; suggestio falsi &c (lie) 546 [Lat.]; mystification &c (concealment) 528; simulation &c (imitation) 19; dissimulation, dissembling; deceit; blague^. sham; pretense, pretending, malingering. lip homage, lip service; mouth honor; hollowness; mere show, mere outside; duplicity, double dealing, insincerity, hypocrisy, cant, humbug; jesuitism, jesuitry; pharisaism; Machiavelism, organized hypocrisy; crocodile tears, mealy-mouthedness^, quackery; charlatanism^, charlatanry; gammon; bun-kum^, bumcombe, flam; bam [Slang], flimflam, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... all things were blotted out by a hot rush of tears, and she was jostled as in a dream hither and thither by the double stream of crowd. Nothing since the death of Benjamin had given her so poignant a sense of the hollowness and uncertainty of existence. What would her father say, whose triumphant conviction that Providence had provided for his Passover was to be so rudely dispelled at the eleventh hour. Poor Moses! He had been so proud of having earned enough money to make a good Yontov, and ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... believes that he is going to live a plain unsophisticated life, according to nature and common sense, in company with one whom the hollowness and trickishness of society has never infected. He is not long in finding out his irreparable blunder. The lady is not received. People do not visit her, and although one of his motives in choosing a sort of wife whom people do not visit was the express desire ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... the Sunday sermons; the emptiness of the prayers, written in advance and spoken with conventional unctuous voice, and gestures to suit; and the apathy of the people who, dressed out in their best, came to listen,—how early I divined its hollowness,—and how deep was my disappointment, and how cruel the disillusionment—oh! the disheartening formalism of it all! The very appearance of the church disconcerted me: it was a new cityfied one, meant to be pretty without, however, meaning to be too much so; I especially ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... all his heart, and would even yet dream of bliss that might be possible with her,—had not the terrible hand of irresistible Fate come between them and marred it all. It was only a dream now. It could be no more than a dream. He put out his thin wasted hands and looked at them, and touched the hollowness of his own cheeks, and coughed that he might hear the hacking sound of his own infirmity, and almost took glory in his weakness. It could not be long before the coals of fire would ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... admiring the courage that had snubbed Tozer with a word. But his musing remark rang a bell in young Gourlay. By Jove, he had thought that himself, so he had! He was a hollow thing, he knew, but a buckram pretence prevented the world from piercing to his hollowness. The son of his courageous sire (whom he equally admired and feared) had learned to play the game of bluff. A bold front was half the battle. He had worked out his little theory, and it was with a shock of pleasure the timid youngster heard great Allan ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... stared up; without a stir in the great, gaunt body, he was dead. Pierre reverently drew the eyes shut. There were no tears in his eyes, but a feeling of hollowness about his heart. He straightened and looked about him and found that the room was ...
— Riders of the Silences • Max Brand
... only say that if you do not like your life, it is your own fault. How can a man of your age talk of being melancholy, or of the hollowness of existence? Are you consumptive? Are you subject to hereditary insanity? Are you deaf, like Aunt Bluebell? Are you poor, like—lots of people? Have you been crossed in love? Have you lost the world for a woman, or any particular woman for the sake of the world? Are you feeble-minded, ...
— The Upper Berth • Francis Marion Crawford
... in a word, the man of natural feelings, absolute and entire. Such a man, brought into contact with the temperaments, calculations, falsehoods, deceptions, tricks, restrictions, and hollowness of a refined society, such as Paris, for example, would, without doubt, form a very curious subject for speculation. We raise this hypothesis, because, since his journey to France had been determined on, Djalma had one fixed, ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... her broad face and following his every movement with adoring eyes. To all but Dr. Harpe he looked the fortunate and beaming bridegroom and only she saw the tiny lines which sleeplessness had left about his eyes or detected the hollowness of his ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... wrangled more fiercely than ever. There were unpleasant taunts and mutual revilings. The listener by the rock learnt definitely what he had previously suspected—that there was bitter blood and bad feeling between the two men, buried for a time, but now revived with a savageness which revealed the hollowness of their supposed reconciliation. It was about a girl, some girl in England with whom they had both been in love. Thalassa gathered that Remington had left England as the favoured suitor. He had (in Thalassa's words) "cut ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... been human if incidents like these had not caused him pain. Occasionally he would give vent to his grief, but his manly courage, too, would soon assert itself, and he would expose the hollowness, insincerity, and futility of the lying tales that were spread about him. At a public meeting in Campo Flore he was cursed, sentenced to death, and burned in effigy. (21a, 174.) He has read offensive reports about himself, and puts them down with the calm declaration: There is not a man ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... sufficient to excite it. From the palaces of kings—from the tents of warriors, he comes—equally at home with man in all aspects—to the cotter's hearth:—he bids us turn from the pomp of the Plantagenets to bow the knee to the poor Jew's daughter—he makes us sicken at the hollowness of the royal Rothsay, to sympathize with the honest love of Hugh the smith. No never was there one—not even Burns himself—who forced us more intimately to acknowledge, or more deeply ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 569 - Volume XX., No. 569. Saturday, October 6, 1832 • Various
... is a little hollowed; to make this hollowness, a Square must be made, whose Side must be equal to the Pan, in which the Channelling is to be made, and having put one foot of the Compass in the middle of the Square, make a crooked Line from one Angle of the Channelling ...
— An Abridgment of the Architecture of Vitruvius - Containing a System of the Whole Works of that Author • Vitruvius
... anything, dare to judge of that Sovereign Being who is infinite by His very definition. He demands upon what principles they rest, and presses them to point them out. He examines all that they bring forward, and so searches them by his wonderful penetration as to show the hollowness of what passes for the most clear and established truths. He inquires if the soul knows anything whatever—if it knows itself; whether it is substance or accident, body or spirit; what is each of these things, and ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... reality of the spiritual world, and the duty of living for it, as also the certainty of holding intercommunion with the spirits. The 'Other worldliness' of the mediaeval monastic mysticism had produced a revolt against a conception of life that was false, its passive hostility to civilisation, the hollowness of its ideal existence, its exaggerated asceticism, its disparagement of the family life, and the result was the swing of the pendulum in the opposite direction. The recoil came with the Methodists. ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... corpse. The society might have been waked up if Mr. Lowell, then returning from England, could have been induced to co-operate. He was approached on the subject, but would not respond,—he only said that he desired rest! Alas for the hollowness of American religion ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, May 1887 - Volume 1, Number 4 • Various
... exhibits a vacancy, triviality, and incoherence of mind painful to think of as the state of the departed, and coupled with a pretension to impress one, a disposition to 'fish' and face around and disguise the essential hollowness which is, if anything, more painful still. Mr. Hodgson has to resort to the theory that, although the communicants probably are spirits, they are in a semi-comatose or sleeping state while communicating, and only half aware of what is going on, while the habits ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus
... elude the inquiries of the statistician. They consisted in the utter discredit of the royalist cause throughout France, the resentment that ever follows on clumsy or disloyal co-operation, and the revelation of the hollowness of the imposing fabric of the First Coalition. In the south of France four nations failed to hold a single fortress which her own sons had placed in ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... also displayed the hollowness of the proceedings by making "de Archangelis" the very opposite of his saturnine and blood-thirsty client: the last person we could think of as in sympathy with him. He is a coarse good-natured paterfamilias, whose ambitions ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... neither, indeed, can it be; and they that are in the flesh cannot please God." But in repentance the soul changes its attitude. It no longer refuses the yoke of God's will, like a restive heifer, but yields to it, or is willing to yield. There is a compunction, a sense of the hollowness of all created things, a relenting, a wistful yearning after the true life, and ultimately a turning from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God. The habits may rebel; the inclinations ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... sensitive nature rises in rebellion against it. And these young scions of the East willingly practise this hypocrisy and submit to this indignity in order to live at peace with, and indeed to live at all in, their ancestral caste! It is only an illustration of the hollowness of the major part of the life of the educated community in this great land. Well may one exclaim, what can be expected from a people whose leading men of culture are living this double and mean life! This is verily "peace ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... mill," as the young fellow John called it, where he came off second best. His departure was no doubt hastened by a note from the landlady's daughter, inclosing a lock of purple hair which she "had valued as a pledge of affection, ere she knew the hollowness of the vows he had breathed," speedily followed by another, inclosing the landlady's bill. The next morning he was missing, as were his limited wardrobe and the trunk that held it. Three empty bottles of Mrs. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... only left it yesterday. Fordham, having thrown off his wraps, waited on his guests, looking exceedingly happy in his quiet way, but more fragile than ever. He had a good deal of fair beard, but it could not conceal the hollowness of his cheeks, and there were great caves round his eyes, which were very bright and blue. Yet he was called well, waited assiduously on little Lina, and ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the prodigy. Hollow it was, and of no metal known on earth, was his conclusion. It was right-named by the ones of old-time as the Star-Born. Only from the stars could it have come, and no thing of chance was it. It was a creation of artifice and mind. Such perfection of form, such hollowness that it certainly possessed, could not be the result of mere fortuitousness. A child of intelligences, remote and unguessable, working corporally in metals, it indubitably was. He stared at it in amaze, his brain a racing wild-fire of hypotheses to account for this far-journeyer who had adventured ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... old age, shews itself by talkativeness, boasting of the past, hollowness of the eyes and cheeks, dimness of sight, deafness, tremor of voice, the accents, through default of teeth, scarce intelligible; hams weak, knees tottering, head paralytic, hollow coughing, frequent expectoration, breathless ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... evening stillness. The sky was clear, remote, and empty save for a few horizontal bars far down in the sunset. Well, that night the expectation took the colour of my fears. In that darkling calm my senses seemed preternaturally sharpened. I fancied I could even feel the hollowness of the ground beneath my feet: could, indeed, almost see through it the Morlocks on their ant-hill going hither and thither and waiting for the dark. In my excitement I fancied that they would receive my invasion of their burrows as a declaration of war. And why had they ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... become me on this occasion to make some reflections on the hollowness of court life, which has seldom been better exemplified than in the scene before me. The sun was low, but its warm beams, falling aslant on the gaily dressed group at the gates and on the flowered ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... things which our Lord blames them for, were not nearly so absurd in Judea of old, as they seem to us in England now. Indeed, no one but our Lord seems to have thought them absurd, or seen through the hollowness and emptiness of them:—as he perhaps sees through, my friends, a great deal which is thought very right in England now. Making allowance for the difference of the country, and of the times, the Pharisees ...
— Town and Country Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... to human life, none is so penetrating to gentle hearts as that which fills them with aching regrets, and, for a time, writes hollowness and vanity on their dearest treasures, when death robs them of those they love. And so, of all the questions that haunt the soul, wringing its faculties for a solution, beseeching the oracles of the ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... Arabia, Persia, and Mesopotamia. He was the greatest warrior and conqueror of his time. His power and wealth were enormous. Yet he was fully persuaded of the utter hollowness of riches. He ordered, by his will, that considerable sums should be distributed to Mussulmans, Jews, and Christians, in order that the priests of the three religions might implore for him the mercy of God. He commanded that the shirt or ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... broke every moment. It was odd to hear the muffled chirp and feel the struggling birds beneath their feet as they stepped over the grass-grown soil. The ground had not the slightest appearance of being undermined by the mole-like petrels, its hollowness being only proved when it gave way to the tread; although, after the first surprise of the two young fellows at thus disturbing the tenants of the burrows, they walked as "gingerly" as they could, so as to avoid hurting the little creatures. The birds, ...
— Fritz and Eric - The Brother Crusoes • John Conroy Hutcheson
... by another divine, Middleton's equal in learning and acuteness, and far his superior in subtlety and dialectic skill; who, though an Anglican, scorned the name of Protestant; and, while yet a Churchman, made it his business, to parade, with infinite skill, the utter hollowness of the arguments of those of his brother Churchmen who dreamed that they could be both Anglicans and Protestants. The argument of the "Essay on the Miracles recorded in the Ecclesiastical History of the Early Ages" [60] by the present ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... break again: walk you that way Whilest I in zealous meditation stray A little this way: when we both have ended These rites and duties, by the woods befriended, And secrecie of night, retire and find An aged Oak, whose hollowness may bind Us both within his body, thither go, It ...
— The Faithful Shepherdess - The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher (Vol. 2 of 10). • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... that the present generation, how quietly reaping the fruit of your heroic endurance, should see eye to eye with you in respect to all your testimonies and beliefs, in order to recognize your claim to gratitude and admiration. For, in an age of hypocritical hollowness and mean self-seeking, when, with noble exceptions, the very Puritans of Cromwell's Reign of the Saints were taking profane lessons from their old enemies, and putting on an outside show of conformity, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... disclosed the inward disease, the fearful hollowness, the spiritual death, of the nation's philosophical and theological forms, with resistless eloquence; and like the Jews of old, they will exclaim, "That man ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... with all the softest inequalities in the middle, like a hog's back with the bristles up, and Jehu was expected to keep astride of the spine. As you looked off each side of the bare sphere into the horizon, the ditches were awful to behold,—a vast hollowness, like that between Saturn and his ring. At a tavern hereabouts the hostler greeted our horse as an old acquaintance, though he did not remember the driver. He said that he had taken care of that little mare for a short time, a year or two before, at ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... the case, when the promise and interest of youth settles into impotence and rigidity, when the type which once had the die of thought fresh upon it is worn flat by overuse, or when the shell, once the home of life and bright with ocean's spray, lies with faded colour and emptied hollowness. This is melancholy, indeed, and many such wrecks of religious life are around us. But with Enoch, the increase of life's cares brought an access of fresh devotion. New gifts of Providence roused new feelings of gratitude, and he grappled himself the closer ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F. |
