"Inanity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... be telling your child how wicked he is; what a naughty boy he is; that God will never love him, and all the rest of such twaddle and blatant inanity! Do not, in point of fact, bully him, as many poor little fellows are bullied! It will ruin him if you do; it will make him in after years either a coward or a tyrant. Such conversations, like constant droppings ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse
... the calf in the plea for supper, a cord was slipped about its neck and it was presented in due form. In order that she might not be harassed by its tendance, a gigantic Scotch herder, six feet six inches high and twenty-five years of age, showed how far involuntary inanity can coexist with presumptive sanity as he led it about, the creature holding back heavily at every step and now and again tangling itself, its cord, and its disconcerted bleats about its conductor's long and stalwart ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... give zest to life. They sometimes shock Miss Nancy, but as they do not happen to care what Miss Nancy thinks of them, they manage to live and do something to keep Miss Nancy's friends from settling into chronic inanity. ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... rule, be called with equal propriety millinery dramas. In other words, their success is generally due to their costumes. In this respect they afford a marked contrast to ballet spectacles. The latter give us inanity without clothes; the former, inanity in particularly gorgeous clothes. Which, again, leads to the further remark that the difference between the two styles of inanity is, after all, a clothes thing. This ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 9, May 28, 1870 • Various
... weaknesses; bringing out the really good points of a face; to light up dull eyes, and flush pale lips and cheeks. The faults of his portraits consist in their over-conscious graciousness; they smile and sparkle and are arch and winning to an excess that sometimes approaches inanity. And he was disposed, perhaps, to record the fashions of his time with too intense insistence. There was a rage then, as we know, for a piling up on the head of all sorts of finery: feathers, lace, ribbons, velvet hats, mob-caps, and strings of pearls. Cosway ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... organizations, glee clubs, and orchestras; and more generally by the disposition of the soldiers to sing together at work and play and on the march. The renascence of poetry can be interpreted as a revulsion against the prevailing prosiness; the amateur theatre is equally a protest against the inanity and conventionality of the commercial stage; while the Community Chorus movement is an evidence of a desire to escape a narrow professionalism in music. A similar situation has arisen in the field of domestic architecture, in the form of ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... and extending her range; and this would doubtless be her occupation more and more as she acquired ease and confidence. The expression that came nearest belonging to her, as it were, was the one that came nearest being a blank—an air of inanity when she forgot herself in some act of sincere attention. Then her eye was heavy and her mouth betrayed a commonness; though it was perhaps just at such a moment that the fine line of her head told most. She ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... with smiling inanity, stammered that he was only "goin' to shake hands," and moved sideways towards ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... his seat, but did not deign a reply. The fire that had beamed in his eye gradually expired. His cheek resumed its wonted paleness; but he did not relapse into inanity. He sat with a steady, serene, patient look. Like one prepared not to contend, but ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... genius and of erudition; this will be better; it will show great industry and manly consistency. At the end of it I shall publish proposals for a School. * * * My next letter will be long and full of something;—this is inanity and egotism. * * Believe me, dear Poole, your affectionate and mindful—friend, shall I so soon have to say? Believe me my heart prompts it. [1] ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... their employer. They regarded the new bath-tubs with wonder, albeit somewhat doubtfully. They discussed the library with appreciation, or lack of appreciation, according to their degrees of illiteracy or learning: the socialistic element condemned the inanity of the volumes selected; there were only histories, biographies, books of travel, foolish novels and the like—nothing to teach the manner by which the brotherhood of man ...
— Making People Happy • Thompson Buchanan
... sustains Retirement's silent hours.—Himself he flies, Perchance from that insipid equipoise, Which always with the hapless mind remains That feels no native bias; never gains One energy of will, that does not rise From some external cause, to which he hies From his own blank inanity.—When reigns, With a strong, cultur'd mind, this wretched hate To commune with himself, from thought that tells Of some lost joy, or dreaded stroke of Fate He struggles to escape;—or sense that dwells On secret guilt towards ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... compositions should be, in general, so much more correct than those of other English poets of the first rank. The childish bombast of "Titus Andronicus," the commonplace of Wordsworth, the frequent inanity of the youthful Coleridge and the youthful Byron, Shelley's extravagance, Keats's cockneyism, Tennyson's mawkishness, find no counterpart in Milton's early compositions. All these great writers, though the span of some of them was but short, lived long enough to ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... told that the patriotic and brave Senator Wade, disgusted with the slowness and inanity of the administration, exclaimed, "I do not wonder that people desert to Jeff. Davis, as he shows brains; I may desert myself." And truly, Jeff. Davis and his ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... country isolation and lack of academic training saved him from the inanity of repeating the old decorative devices—trophies, cartouches, classical figures, Roman ruins, and other international conventions that had lost their significance by the 1780's, although a spurious classicism was still kept alive for genteel consumption and the romantic picturesque ...
— Why Bewick Succeeded - A Note in the History of Wood Engraving • Jacob Kainen
... that no man's clothes were mixed with any others. The men all seemed dazed, each soldier seemed to have the same protest upon his mind. "This wasn't the idea at all, I was not to be wounded. Why am I here?" One suddenly felt the brutal inanity of modern warfare; one felt that if the ones who had started this war could only be forced to spend three months in a war hospital, receiving and undressing the fruits of their plots, they would have a different view of the ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon
... children by turns, and had soon made friends with them all. The children were the greatest possible relief to her; she turned to them as a sort of neutral ground between the war in her own heart and the tact and inanity ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... men! gentlemen! was there ever such a poor sneaking scarecrow of an idol as that gaping straw-stuffed inanity you worship, and call honor? It is not Honor; it is but your honor. It is neither gold, nor silver, nor honest copper, but a vile, worthless pinchbeck. It may be, however, for I have not the honor to belong to any of ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... in the way of consequences for life of this radical difference of outlook will only become apparent in my later lectures. I wish meanwhile to close this lecture by showing that rationalism's sublimity does not save it from inanity. ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... the eternal use of the formal orders of the Princess. He watched the two in a vexed stupor until they disappeared. Then he recalled the inanity and exacting requests of the great lady, and guessed how her reader was able to so boldly play his ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... medicine as practised by the faculty. He gathered together materials for a declaration of war against the medicos, attacking them in their, apparently, most impregnable positions, and showing up, often through their own observations, the fatal inanity—in his eyes—of their therapeutics. At the same time he managed to acquire experience of commerce, finance and administration, and, thus equipped, he opened his campaign. Thaumaturgy, science, occultism, eloquence, knowledge of men and of the world—all these he brought ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... condemn yourself to live only by halves, because if you showed too much animation some pragmatical thing in breeches might take it into his pate to imagine that you desired to dedicate your life to inanity. Write again soon, for I feel rather fierce and ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... especially the affliction which springs from passion. Does a writer startle you with his insight into your nature, be sure that he has mourned; such lore is the alchemy of tears. Hence the insensible and almost universal confusion of idea which confounds melancholy with depth, and finds but hollow inanity in the symbol of a laugh. Pitiable error! Reflection first leads us to gloom, but its next stage is to brightness. The Laughing Philosopher had reached the goal of Wisdom; Heraclitus whimpered at the starting-post. But enough for Lucy ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of Highgate Hill in those years, looking down on London and its smoke tumult like a sage escaped from the inanity of life's battle, attracting towards him the thoughts of innumerable brave souls still engaged there. His express contributions to poetry, philosophy, or any specific province of human literature or enlightenment had been small and sadly ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... The inanity of sublunary things has afforded a theme to philosophers, moralists, and divines, from the earliest records of antiquity; "Vanity of vanities!" says the preacher, "all is vanity!" Nor is there any one, I suppose, who has passed the meridian of life, who has not at ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... disease Pegs to hang facts upon Physician and the disease entered, hand in hand Point of mental saturation Post hoc ergo propter hoc error Presumption in favor of poisoning Presumption is always against treatments Pretensions of presumptuous ignorance Pseudological inanity Public itself, which insists on being poisoned Quackery and idolatry are all but immortal Qui a bu, boira Rapid rotation of scientific crops Save all our old treasures of knowledge and mine deeply for new ...
— Widger's Quotations from the Works of Oliver W. Holmes, Sr. • David Widger
... Charles, as Thackeray called him, is sometimes unpardonable; and if Froude had suppressed those passages he would have done well. His own personal conduct is a lesson to us all, and that lesson is in Froude's pages for every one to read. "What a noisy inanity is this world," wrote Carlyle in his diary at the opening of the year 1835. Without the few great men who, like Carlyle, can lift themselves and others above it, it would be still noisier, ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... folk about whose business was to make witty retorts for them and conduct sparkling conversations in their stead, they themselves being too royal for anything so much beneath that level of exalted inanity, which as all men know is the only proper mark of princely minds. Something of this raced hit or miss through Senator Hanway's thoughts, as Mr. Gwynn presented Richard and then relapsed—hinge by hinge as though his joints were rusty with ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... violence into a whirling story. The villain was a traveller in buttons—buttons! To be wronged by a traveller in diamonds might have its compensations—but buttons! Linen buttons, bone buttons, brass buttons, trouser buttons! To be a traveller in the inanity of buttonholes was the only lower degradation. His name was Bondon—he uttered it scathingly, as if to decline from a Bocardon to a Bondon was unthinkable. This Bondon was a regular client of the ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... he had a decided preference for old-fashioned people. His placid disposition liked their quiet ways and abhorred all sorts of trivial excitement; he was a man who was intimately conscious of the inanity of most forms of amusement, and of the emptiness of most kinds of sensations. The cold, still depths of his heart could not be warmed to a pleasurable heat by the small emotions which the world covets, and so eagerly pursues. He sometimes ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... same time its ancient simplicity also departed. Theology, the spurious offspring of reason and faith, was already occupied in introducing its own tedious prolixity and solemn inanity into the old homely national faith, and thereby expelling the true spirit of that faith. The catalogue of the duties and privileges of the priest of Jupiter, for instance, might well have a place in the Talmud. They pushed the natural rule—that no religious service can be acceptable to ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... her without getting sore toes. True enough, there do appear cases where it seems to work pretty well; but when they are inquired into, it is generally found either that the husband is a simpleton, submitting by mere inanity, or a man who has resisted to the uttermost, and is at last crumpled up by pure "Caudlish" iteration and perseverance. How Tammas took it ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... he spoke the truth, and that it was impossible for him to convey it in any other than his natural manner; but between the shock and the singular influence of that manner she could at first only say, "You don't mean it!" fully conscious of the utter inanity of the remark, and that it seemed scarcely less cold-blooded ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... no small honour for this nation to have been wise enough to see the inanity of this and all other forms of divination. . . . Of what other ancient civilized nation ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... the hours he sat with lack-lustre eye and addled brain, brooding at the sluttish typewriter. He remembers the flush of shame that tingled him as he walked sadly homeward, thinking of some atrocious inanity he had sent upstairs to the composing-room. It is a job that ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... allowing herself to express a decided interest in his doings, and never once throwing on him the burden of a conversational deadlift in the manner with which a girl knows how to discourage all but the dullest of bores. Now and then, indeed, when Mark's conversation showed symptoms of the occasional inanity common to most men who talk much, she did not spare him; but this was due to a jealous anxiety on her part that he should keep up to his own standard, and if she had not liked him she would not have taken the trouble. He took her light shafts so patiently and good-humouredly, ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... Janetta, "in a cardboard case, with some inanity about 'digging for fortune with a royal spade' emblazoned on the cover. The moment I saw it in the shop I said to myself 'Froplinsons' and to the attendant 'How much?' When he said 'Ninepence,' I gave him their address, jabbed our card in, paid ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... no doubt—was to restrict the use of tobacco to the clergy, to country squires, to merchants and tradesmen and to the humbler ranks of society—to limit it, in short, to the middle and lower classes of the social commonwealth as then organized. In the extraordinary record of inanity which Addison printed as the diary of a citizen in the Spectator of March 4, 1712, the devotion of the worthy retired tradesman to tobacco is emphasized. This is the kind of thing: "Monday ... Hours 10, 11 and 12 Smoaked ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... camps often to procure game or fish, the want of domestic animals, the general dependence on wild rice, and the custom of journeying in canoes has produced a general uniformity of life, and it is emphatically a life of want and vicissitude. There is a perpetual change between action and inanity in the mind which is a striking peculiarity of the savage state, and there is such a general want of forecast that most of their misfortunes and hardships, in war ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... my poem, Though it may be a difficult matter to show 'em. Well, first (let me see, now), the foolishest passion Of mortals is that for obeying the fashion. It has been, and now is, a curse to humanity, A sinful, ridiculous species of vanity, The very quintessence of perfect inanity, And is likely to lead to a ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... idea opened up to Mr. Anstey a comic vista, which he has developed for our delectation. The songs and dances, with their words and directions, are for the most part screamingly funny, consisting partly in the perfectly realised absurdity and inanity of the performance, and partly in that quality of absolute truthfulness to life which we are forced to realise in the presentation of them. Laughter is often produced by the mere faithfulness of an imitation, whether the thing copied is funny or not. Simple mimicry has ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... into her husband's presence she had nothing to say, and Milton, the theorist, discovered that what he had mistaken for the natural reticence and bashfulness of maidenhood was mere inanity and lack of ideas. But the loneliness of the poor country girl, shut up in a student's den, is a deal more touching than the scholar's wail about "the silent and insensate" wife. The girl was being deprived of the rollicking freedom to which she had been used, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... will have to be investigated. All that will have to be stopped.... And it makes another reason why it is necessary to fight today, to fight to the death. For these Germans will understand the inanity of their Machiavellian scheming and of their spy system only when they shall see these methods fall to pieces, when they shall ...
— Fighting France • Stephane Lauzanne
... had often cajoled him to buy things that he could not afford, to entertain people that he would rather not see, to indulge his children in vanities and follies against his better judgment, to desert his plain duty to his Church in favor of some social inanity. She was always tempting, caressing, and charming him with playful banter when he would be serious, weakening him when he would be strong, coaxing him to play when he would have worked. He had been as wax in her hands; but ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley
... abortion! With vacant stare, And ragged hair, And every feature out of all proportion! Embodiment of echoing inanity! Excellent type of simpering insanity! Unwieldy, clumsy nightmare of humanity! I ...
— Fifty Bab Ballads • William S. Gilbert
... strike me as being pretty," said Lydia; "but it seems as innocent as inanity can make it." Her mind misgave her that she had ignorantly and unjustly reproached Cashel Byron with ferocity merely because he practised ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... to preach, I knew again why Lizzie had paid no heed to me. All he said had nothing to do with me or my wants. And if not with these, how could they have any influence on the all but outcasts of the social order? I justified Lizzie to the very full now; and I took refuge from the inanity of the sermon in thinking about her faithfulness. And that faithfulness was far beyond anything I ...
— Adela Cathcart - Volume II • George MacDonald
... take in here at Keswick the Gentleman's Magazine, alias the Oldwomania, to enlighten a Portuguese student among the mountains; it does amuse me by its exquisite inanity, and the glorious and intense stupidity of its correspondents; it is, in truth, a disgrace to the age and the country.' Southey's Life and Correspondence, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... conceive the feeling of the Court; and how counsel met counsel, the loud-sounding inanity whirled in that distracted vortex, where wisdom could not dwell. Your cunningly devised Taxing-Machine has been got together; set up with incredible labour; and stands there, its three pieces in contact; its two fly-wheels ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... study of that by virtue of which the characteristic in things is a positive principle, must preserve him from emptiness, weakness, inward inanity, before he can venture to aim, by ever higher combination and final melting together of manifold forms, to reach the extremest beauty in works uniting the highest simplicity with ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... opportunity he had entered the body of Kage, in search of human requirements and enjoyments. Betrayed by appetite he had been driven forth by the prayers of the abbot, and solaced by his petitions for the future life. Deign to let the matter rest there, and not pursue him into the inanity, the nothingness of Nirvana. To this the practiced ear of the holy Bankei gave deep thought. This fellow already had forced the unhappy Kakunai to follow in his tracks. What might he not do to others in whom the abbot had far greater interest? "To ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... considerable character and attainments. Who would guess it who read all these trivial comments, these catalogues of what he had for dinner, these inane domestic confidences—all the more interesting for their inanity! The effect left upon the mind is of some grotesque character in a play, fussy, self-conscious, blustering with women, timid with men, dress-proud, purse-proud, trimming in politics and in religion, a garrulous gossip ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the mischievous merriment in the lady's eyes. And his gallant answer was interrupted by some inanity from Herr von Mark. ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous
... in the English language, of which the signification is so loose and general, the use so vague and indeterminate, and the senses detorted so widely from the first idea, that it is hard to trace them through the maze of variation, to catch them on the brink of utter inanity, to circumscribe them by any limitations, or interpret them by any words of distinct and settled meaning; such are bear, break, come, cast, fall, get, give, do, put, set, go, run, make, take, turn, throw. If of these the whole power is not accurately delivered, it must be remembered, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... speechless with amazement. Miss Mewlstone's face was crimson; her small eyes were sparkling with angry excitement: all her softness and gentle inanity had vanished. ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... institutions, which are calculated to promote general happiness, become, in consequence, a source of mortification to the majority of a neighbourhood, and of petty and inadequate gratification to those whose inanity of character, or obsequiousness of manners, have rendered them tolerable to the family, or small junto, who usually take it upon themselves to ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... in my Prussian History; I bore and dig toilsomely through the unutterablest mass of dead rubbish, which is not even English, which is German and inhuman; and hardly from ten tons of learned inanity is there to be riddled one old rusty nail. For I have been back as far as Pytheas who, first of speaking creatures, beheld the Teutonic Countries; and have questioned all manner of extinct German shadows,—who answer nothing but mumblings. And on the whole Fritz ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... say something wonderful to her; his speech should be like the music and glory and lire that was in him; therefore he was shocked to hear himself remarking, with an inanity of utterance ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington
... the confusion of controversies, the cowardice of conventionality, the vanity of declarations, the inanity of proofs. He saw himself bruised and thrust aside by the reflections of everybody, obliged henceforward to advance or retire, dispute ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... hourly With heroes simple-souled, He looks no longer sourly On men of normal mould, But, purged of mental vanity And erudite inanity, The clay of his humanity Is turning fast ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, June 7, 1916 • Various
... the spectacle of those persons, the weaver, the thresher, and the mechanic, who by injudicious patronage are drawn from their proper sphere, only to exhibit upon a larger stage their imbecility and inanity, to shew those moderate powers, which in their proper application would have carried their possessors through life with respect, distorted into absurdity, and used in the attempt to make us look upon a dwarf, as if he were ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... Transcendentalism, and see nothing under one but the everlasting snows of Himmalayah, the Earth shrinking to a Planet, and the indigo firmament sowing itself with daylight stars; easy for you, for me: but whither does it lead? I dread always, To inanity and mere injuring of the lungs!—"Stamp, Stamp, Stamp!"— Well, I do believe, for one thing, a man has no right to say to his own generation, turning quite away from it, "Be damned!" It is the whole Past and the whole Future, this same cotton-spinning, dollar-hunting, canting and ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... up from the very dregs, to give the excluded pictures of the life of the exclusives—yet, what have we? You will excuse us, reader, disturbing the current of our thoughts, by recollecting any of this forty novel-power of inanity, vulgarity, and pertness; but if you take up any of the many volumes in marbled boards, with calf backs, that you will find in cart-loads at the circulating libraries, and look over a page of the fashionable "lingo" the Lord Jacob ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... serious selves and letting the fool loose. The dullness of the millionaire joke is much deeper. It is not silly at all; it is solely stupid. It does not consist of ingenuity limited, but merely of inanity expanded. There is considerable difference between a wit making a fool of himself and a fool making ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... "that all is vanity"— Most modern preachers say the same, or show it By their examples of true Christianity: In short, all know, or very soon may know it; And in this scene of all-confessed inanity, By Saint, by Sage, by Preacher, and by Poet, Must I restrain me, through the fear of strife, From holding ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... always dimly groping for. The book is written throughout on the verge of realism, with divinations and conjectures across its border, and with lapses into the fool's paradise of romanticism, and an apparent content with its inanity and impossibility. But then it was brilliantly new and surprising; it seemed to be the last word that could be said for the truth in fiction; and it had a spell that held us like an anesthetic above the ache of parting, and the anxiety for the years ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... him vanity; the hilarity of youth, folly; he considers how soon the gloom of death must overshadow the one and disappoint the other. The world presents little to attract and nothing to delight him. A few more years of infirmity, inanity and pain must consign him to idiocy or the grave. Yet this was the gay, the generous, the high-souled boy who beheld the ascending path of life strewn with flowers without a thorn. Such is human life; but such cannot be the ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 2, February 1886 • Various
... had written it, but were displeased at his stealing from the "Road to Ruin;" and those who might have borne a gentlemanly coxcomb with his "That's your sort," "Go it"—such as Lewis is—did not relish the intolerable vulgarity and inanity of the idea stript of his manner. De Camp was hooted, more than hist, hooted and bellowed off the stage before the second act was finished, so that the remainder of his part was forced to be, with some ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... brow of Highgate Hill, in those years, looking down on London and its smoke-tumult, like a sage escaped from the inanity of life's battle; attracting towards him the thoughts of innumerable brave souls still engaged there. His express contributions to poetry, philosophy, or any specific province of human literature or enlightenment, had been small and sadly intermittent; but he had, ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... the young woman who acted formerly as my guide. She led me, at my request, instantly to the sickroom of her lady, who, having immediately before been seized with an attack of vomiting, was lying in a state of exhaustion approaching to the inanity of death. I spoke to her, and she languidly opened her eyes. I saw no prospect of being able to impress upon her comatose mind the awful truth I had come to communicate; yet I had no alternative but to make the attempt; ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... rest of Long Island is the discourse of which East Hampton is the peroration. There are enough bluffs to relieve the dead level, enough grass to clothe the hills, enough trees to drop the shadow, enough society to keep one from inanity, and enough quietude to soothe twelve months of perturbation. The sea hums us to sleep at night, and fills our dreams with intimations of the land where the harmony is like "the voice of many waters." In ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... most contemptible in winter; but you, ye lingerers," he added, looking to a knot of beeches which still bore their withered leaves, "you are the proud plans of adventurous manhood, formed later, and still clinging to the mind of age, although it acknowledges their inanity! None lasts—none endures, save the foliage of the hardy oak, which only begins to show itself when that of the rest of the forest has enjoyed half its existence. A pale and decayed hue is all it possesses, but still it retains that symptom of vitality to the last.—So ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... fakir was ever more conscious of the struggle with inward corruption than he, and at times he could cry out, "Oh, wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" but he did not seek relief in idleness and inanity, but in what Dr. Chalmers called "the expulsive power of new affections," in new measures of Christlike devotion to the cause of truth and humanity. In a word, Christ and his kingdom displaced the power of evil. He could ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... Shakespeare, thus coming on me suddenly, struck me as with a thunderbolt. His lightning opened the heaven of art to me with a sublime crash, and lighted up its farthest depths. I recognized true dramatic grandeur, beauty, and truth. I measured at the same time the boundless inanity of the notions of Shakespeare in ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... which the present century almost unconsciously enjoys. We should lose one of the most instructive lessons which history can afford, if, with Carlyle, we should allow the eighteenth century to lie "massed up in our minds as a disastrous, wrecked inanity, not useful to dwell upon,"[90] The England of that century was modern England, but modern England, burdened with a heritage of corruption and ignorance which it is the glory of the time to have in large part discarded. It was a time of social and material progress, and it ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... Daumier's figures are almost always either foolish, fatuous politicians or frightened, mystified bourgeois; yet they help him to give us a strong sense of the nature of man. They are some times so serious that they are almost tragic the look of the particular pretension, combined with inanity, is carried almost to madness. There is a magnificent drawing of the series of "Le Public du Salon," old classicists looking up, horrified and scandalized, at the new romantic work of 1830, in which the faces have an appalling gloom of mystification and platitude. ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... wrathfully. "What are you to her? Do you suppose she takes you for a symbol? I wish to Heaven she did. A round cipher of naught, the symbol of inanity. She takes you for an honourable gentleman. I've known the child since she was born. As good a little girl as you could wish ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... as a monotonous hum; of which hum the true character is extremely difficult to fix. Up to this hour we have never fully satisfied ourselves whether it is a tone and hum of real Humour, which we reckon among the very highest qualities of genius, or some echo of mere Insanity and Inanity, which doubtless ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... Inanity] could not continue and did not subsist, because it had no human conformation nor the system of the Balance, the Sephiroth being points, one below the other. The first Adam [Microprosopos, as distinguished from Macroprosopos, ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... and plagues and stormy seasons were transplanted from without into the microcosm within, taking the shape of hallucinations and demon-temptations. They were no longer actors, but sufferers; automata, who attained a degree of inanity which would have made their old ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... imprisonment, found an interest in marking the moments by straight strokes of a certain length on the wall, until the growth of the sum of straight strokes, arranged in triangles, has become a mastering purpose? Do we not wile away moments of inanity or fatigued waiting by repeating some trivial movement or sound, until the repetition has bred a want, which is incipient habit? That will help us to understand how the love of accumulating money grows an absorbing passion in men whose ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... press and the public sees no change; but we, who worked beside him, see it nightly. By twelve o'clock on a busy night, nervous, drawn faces surround the central desk, and profanity is snapped crossly back and forth. There is no alleviation of cheerful inanity. Presently somebody looks up, remarking, "I wish Bobbie Barton was back." And somebody else replies with profane asperity and lax grammar, "I wish he was!" Bobbie, meanwhile has become a lawyer, and can now afford a ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... think that even at the worst moments Bunter really desired to drown Captain Johns. I fancy that all his disordered imagination longed for was merely to stop the ghostly inanity of the skipper's talk. ...
— Tales Of Hearsay • Joseph Conrad
... be said, that the minds of the uncultivated order are not generally in this state of utter inanity during their common employments; but are often awake and busy enough in recollections, fancies, projects, and the tempers appropriate; and that they abundantly show this when they stop sometimes in their work to talk, or talk as they are proceeding in it. ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... had been by what Sir Walter Scott calls the "huge folios of inanity" which had preceded him, the work was hailed with delight. There was a little affectation; but the sentiment was moral and natural. Ladies carried Pamela about in their rides and walks. Pope, near his end, said it was a better moral teacher than sermons: Sherlock ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... simple words. And yet they are our hearts' testimony to her in whose name we are assembled and, let us hope, made worthy. To us who believe that life reels not back from the white charger of Death towards the gulf of inanity and oblivion, there is a vivid realization that our words may be spoken to the conscious spirit; and we desire that, in the sacred name of truth, and with the love that comprehends and overcomes, we may speak simply as "soul ...
— Memories of Jane Cunningham Croly, "Jenny June" • Various
... flirtation, engrossed the homage of the majority of females, while a few misguided ones, weary of the inanity of the mass of womanhood and desiring to effect a reform, mistook the sources of the evil, and, rushing to the opposite extreme, demanded power, which as a privilege they already possessed, but as a ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... the school to deliver messages from parents or guardians or the said friends. These messengers, young gentlemen with budding mustaches and full-blown raiment, were rigidly inspected and their visits carefully chaperoned: but letters came and were treasured and the cheerful inanity of their contents imparted, in strict secrecy, to bosom friends of ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... horrors and shut out from wonted pleasures. It belongs to material growths to ripen, loosen, decay; but what is there in sensation, reflection, memory, volition, to crumble in pieces and rot away? Why should the power of hope, and joy, and faith, change into inanity and oblivion? What crucible shall burn up the ultimate of force? What material processes shall ever disintegrate the simplicity of spirit? Earth and plant, muscle, nerve, and brain, belong to one sphere, and ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... very different creature from the mother whom Mr. Sheldon had absorbed into himself. Georgy was one of the women who have "no characters at all," but Georgy's daughter was open to the charge of eccentricity rather than of inanity. She was a creature of fancies and impulses She had written wild verses in the secrecy of her own chamber at midnight, and had torn her poetic effusions into a thousand fragments the morning after their composition. ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... say: "Tell us what you will of existence above and beyond that which is known to us; but do not deny some measure of ultimate Reality to that which falls within our ken. Leave us not alone with the Absolute of the orthodox mystic, or we perish of inanity! Clearly the elan vital—the will to live—gives us a more hopeful starting-point in our search for the Real. Clearly the inexhaustible variety of the universe of sense need not be dubbed an illusion to save the consistency ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... he could never get the art of commanding respect," and imagined it was owing to his deficiency in what Sterne calls "that understrapping virtue of discretion;" "I am so apt to a lapsus linguae" says this honest sinner. Amidst the stupidity of a formal circle, and the inanity of triflers, however such men may conceal their impatience, one of them has forcibly described the reaction of this suppressed feeling: "The force with which it burst out when the pressure was ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... otherwise so devoid of interest; and I may truly say that the lesson learned from meeting my cousin taught me more than all those I had received in the space of three years. In short, I had learned how vain is advice dictated by the caprice of a master without a system! I had learned the inanity of individual reason in a matter of experience. I knew that certain laws existed, that those laws proceeded from a Supreme Reason, an immense centre of light, of which each man's reason is but a single ray. I knew without ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... create tragic or heroic types of poetry. Architecture, sculpture and painting had performed their task of developing mediaeval motives by the light of classic models, and were now entering on the stage of academical inanity. Yet the mental vigor of the Italians was by no means exhausted. Early in the sixteenth century Machiavelli had inaugurated a new method for political philosophy; Pompanazzo at Padua and Telesio at Cosenza disclosed new horizons for psychology and the science of nature. It seemed as though ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... Her poise, her unconsciousness, the winning simplicity of her manner were noticed everywhere, and everywhere commented on. People betrayed a tendency to form groups around her; women, prepared by her unusual beauty for anything between mediocrity and inanity, were a little perplexed ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... suggested for you to answer—as answer I know you will. It is almost a Shame to put you to it by such a piece of inanity as this letter. But it is written: it is 10 p.m. A Pipe—and then to Bed—with what ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... unhappy circumstances of the Verlocs' married life. He went so far as to suspect Mr Verloc of having selected that extraordinary manner of committing suicide. By Jove! that would account for the utter inanity and wrong-headedness of the thing. No anarchist manifestation was required by the circumstances. Quite the contrary; and Verloc was as well aware of that as any other revolutionist of his standing. What an immense joke if Verloc had simply made fools of the whole ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... should supersede future Vandycks. As Webster used to say to young lawyers, there is plenty of room up stairs. Painters may fearlessly aim to get above the sun. Take one of Sully's women and compare it with the smoothest print softened into inanity by the dots of the retoucher of negatives—the representative of the element of art in the process. A difference exists equivalent to that between brain and no brain. No woman, "primp" herself for the sitting ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... fallen bankrupt, given up to the auctioneers;—Jew-brokers sorting out of it at this moment, in a confused distressing manner, what is still valuable or salable. And, in fact, it lies massed up in our minds as a disastrous wrecked inanity, not useful to dwell upon; a kind of dusky chaotic background, on which the figures that had some veracity in them—a small company, and ever growing smaller as our demands rise in strictness—are delineated for ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle
... habitudes. This is done by asking the spiritual import of every physical object seen; also by forming the habit of constantly metaphorizing. Knock at the door of anything met which interests, and ask, 'Who lives here?' The process is to look, then close the eyes, then look within." The blundering inanity of this kind of writing is equaled only by its bumptious grandiloquence. On p. 137 Dr. Townsend quotes this wholesome admonition from Coleridge: "If men would only say what they have to say in plain terms, how much more eloquent they would be!" As an example of reportorial ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... that did not metaphysics 'teach man his tether,' they would seem illimitable. The book of nature is not spread before us, turning leaf after leaf at every sunrise, with new delineations on every page, to be stared at with vacant inanity, or criticized with imbecile verbosity. The rivulet does not tinkle and the sky does not look blue that people may feed the ear alone with the one, or satisfy the eye alone with the other; the nerves which ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... a discovery," she announced. "No, don't look frightened. It's only that poor Biddy's belle trouvaille has got a heart. She's not the tinted Canova-nymph, the piece of correct inanity, I honestly believed her.... She idolised Biddy—small credit, for who could help it? She submitted to be adored by that poor foolish boy who's dead.... Now she's her black-avised Doctor's ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... imperceptibly from the world; and no one marvelled if he met the Pope arm in arm with the Devil. How miserable, in comparison, is the present sapless age, with its prudery and its pedantry, and its periwigs and its painted coaches, and its urban Arcadias and the florid impotence and ostentatious inanity of what it calls its art! Pope Alexander! I see in the spirit the sepulchre destined for you, and I swear to you that my soul shivers in my ratskins! Come, now! I do not expect you to emulate the Popes of my time, but show that your virtues are your own, and ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... conditions she never phrased he used to murmur to himself in solitude: "One more, one more—only just one." Certainly he was going down; he often felt it when he caught himself, over his work, staring at vacancy and giving voice to that inanity. There was proof enough besides in his being so weak and so ill. His irritation took the form of melancholy, and his melancholy that of the conviction that his health had quite failed. His altar moreover had ceased to exist; ...
— The Altar of the Dead • Henry James
... an additional reason for making a collection of the incredibly curious literature of Homoeopathy before that pseudological inanity has faded out like so many ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... of the law, when I was cooped up for eight hours out of the twenty-four with nincompoops of the first water, I saw queer characters enough to convince myself that all is not dead-level even in obscure places, and that in the flattest inanity you may chance upon an angle. Yes, dear boy, such and such a philistine is to such another ...
— The Firm of Nucingen • Honore de Balzac
... all is vanity'- Most modern preachers say the same, or show it By their examples of true Christianity: In short, all know, or very soon may know it; And in this scene of all-confess'd inanity, By saint, by sage, by preacher, and by poet, Must I restrain me, through the fear of strife, From holding ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... was a great poet who sometimes nodded. . . . Coleridge was a muddle-brained metaphysician who, by some strange freak of fortune, turned out a few real poems amongst the dreary flood of inanity which was his wont. . . . I have been through the poems, and find that the only ones which have any interest for me are: (1) 'Ancient Mariner'; (2) 'Christabel'; (3) 'Kubla Khan'; and (4) the poem called 'Love'" (Mackail's "Life of Morris," ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... again. Does he realize the inanity of the hypothesis I try to pass off on him? Does he think I know more than I will say? However this may be, he accepts my professed ...
— Facing the Flag • Jules Verne
... all like a dream, that visit to the old places. I did not feel then that I was lonely, that I had come out from the world into a desolate place. I appreciated my loss of sympathy, but I put it down to the general inanity of things. Re-entering my room seemed like the recovery of reality. There were the things I knew and loved. There stood the apparatus, the experiments arranged and waiting. And now there was scarcely a difficulty left, beyond the ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... seems I could, though indeed I may deceive myself. But I will not make the attempt. We were both too ill-educated to speak our full meanings, we stamped out our feelings with clumsy stereotyped phrases; you who are better taught would fail to catch our intention. The effect would be inanity. But our first words I may give you, because though they conveyed nothing to me at the time, ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... That bit of inanity has been haunting my ears. Tone down The Captive! Tone down the faith and rapture of my whole life, until it is what the reading public will find natural!—And tone down the Liebes-Tod—and tone down the ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... hasheesh an' goes off to hear Profissor Maryanna tell him that 'if th' dates iv human knowledge must be rejicted as subjictive, how much more must they be subjicted as rejictive if, as I think, we keep our thoughts fixed upon th' inanity iv th' finite in comparison with th' onthinkable truth with th' ondivided an' onimaginable reality. Boys ar-re ...
— Mr. Dooley's Philosophy • Finley Peter Dunne
... complied, accompanying herself on the ukulele, she suggested his weird "Cowboy's Lament." In some inexplicable way of love, she had come to like her husband's one song. Because he sang it, she liked its inanity and monotonousness; and most of all, it seemed to her, she loved his hopeless and adorable flatting of every note. She could even sing with him, flatting as accurately and deliciously as he. Nor did she undeceive ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... followed upon imitator, until there was a universal dearth of soul; and men gravely asserted that everything had been said and done in poetry and literature that could be said and done. What a glorious reply has since been given to this utterance of inanity and formalism, in a countless host of great and original names, all the world knows. But in no country was this Gallomania more strongly and enduringly prevalent than in Sweden. The principal writers of the early part of the Gallic period are Dalin, Nordenflycht, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... is an excellent short story whose strength is rather in its moral than in its plot. The editorials are certainly not lacking in force, and seem well calculated to stir the average amateur from his torpor of triteness and inanity. ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... firmament of Young England, we would probably have allowed his effusions to die of their own utter insignificance. But since they have acted as they have done, we too must be permitted to express our opinion of their merits; and our deliberate judgment is, that the weakest inanity ever perpetrated in rhyme by the vilest poetaster of any former generation, becomes masculine verse when contrasted with the nauseous pulings of Mr Patmore's muse. Indeed, we question whether the strains of any poetaster can be considered vile, when brought into ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... some inanity about my mother's Poltalloch, and we talked for a moment. She said she hoped I was quite all right again, and I suppose I said I was, with my leg shooting like a gathered tooth (it was pretty bad all ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... without a wedding garment. There were still a few people staying in the house—the shooting party proper, and Lady Chudley, had long since gone—but enough remained to be a social microcosm for Paul. Every eye was upon him. In spite of himself, his accusing hand went fingering the inanity of his waistcoat front. He also fingered, with a horrible fascination, the dirty piece of card that took the place of his watch in ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... whether it be such celestial harp-music as caused Thebe's walls to rise, or the discordant bray of the ram's horn which made Jericho's to fall, and Mr. Talmage is emphatically a noise-producer. From the lecherous, but learned and logical Beecher to the gabbling inanity now doing the drum-major act, is ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... once to every one; the disgusting statue now placed so as to conceal Giotto's important tempera picture in Santa Croce is a better instance, but a still more impressive lesson might be received by comparing the inanity of Canova's garland grace, and ball-room sentiment with the intense truth, tenderness, and power of men like Mino da Fiesole, whose chisel leaves many a hard edge, and despises down and dimple, but it seems to cut light and ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... Steele and Addison. An air of giddy gaiety mingled with the good sense, taste, and information which their conversation exhibited; and it seemed to be their object to unite the character of men of fashion and lovers of the polite arts. A fine gentleman, bred up in the thorough idleness and inanity of pursuit, which I understand is absolutely necessary to the character in perfection, might in all probability have traced a tinge of professional pedantry which marked the barrister in spite of his efforts, and something of active bustle in his companion, ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... thing, mind, nor power. As manifested by mankind it stands for a lie, nothing claiming to be something, - for lust, dishonesty, 330:30 selfishness, envy, hypocrisy, slander, hate, theft, adultery, murder, dementia, insanity, inanity, devil, hell, with all ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy |
