"Nothingness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... morning. "If I thought," he said, "that I should not see her in the other life, my poor imagination would shrink from the idea of perfect bliss, which I would fain promise myself in it."[237] To pluck so gracious a flower of hope on the edge of the sombre unechoing gulf of nothingness into which our friend has slid silently down, is a natural impulse of the sensitive soul, numbing remorse and giving a moment's relief to the hunger and thirst of a tenderness that has been robbed of its object. Yet would not ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... life, rigid in morality, unquestionable in orthodoxy; no sound of suspicion having ever come near his belief in all the traditions of the elders; intelligent and learned, high up among the ranks of Israel! What was it that made this man's morality a piece of dead nothingness? What was it that made his orthodoxy just so many dry words, from out of which all the life had gone? What was it? This one thing: there was no love in it. As I said, Love is the foundation of all obedience; without it, morality degenerates into mere casuistry. Love is the foundation of all knowledge; ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... shoemaker's son who had but to open his yet beardless lips, and the high-born poem which had Sackville to father and Sidney to sponsor was silenced and eclipsed for ever among the poor plebeian crowd of rhyming shadows that waited in death on the noble nothingness of its ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... my not allowing myself to believe in Jack. You seem not to realize that such a belief would—might—stand between me and madness. I've been trying to adjust myself to a possible scheme of living—getting through the years till I go into nothingness. I can't. All I can grasp is the feeling that a man might have if dropped from a balloon and forced to stay gasping in the air, with no place in it, nothing to hold to, no breath to draw, no earth to rest on, no end to hope for. There ...
— The Lifted Bandage • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... stood for an instant on a plate while the light centered there curled about in a solid core, shutting one off from floor and wall. Ross gasped for breath as the air was sucked out of his lungs. He experienced a moment of deathly sickness with the sensation of being lost in nothingness. Then he breathed again and looked through the dying wall of ...
— The Time Traders • Andre Norton
... an intensity unfathomable by words, my utter nothingness, impotence, and worthlessness, in and for myself. I have learned what a sin is against an infinite, imperishable being, such as is ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... us should find out some painter whom he can care for individually; and that all of us should find out certain painters who can, almost infallibly, give immense pleasure to all of us; painters who, had they been produced out of nothingness and been followed by nobody, would yet stand in the most important relation in which an artist can be: the relation of being beloved by the whole world, or even ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... the wonder of the waves. So level was the beach, so high was the surf, that from the low cart it seemed that gigantic monsters were constantly arising from the sea; and just as the fear of them overshadowed the fascinated mind, they melted away again into nothingness. As he looked at the waves he saw that their water, mixed with sand, was a yellowish brown, and dark almost to black when the curling top yawned before the downfall; but so fast did each wave break one upon the other that glossy water was only seen in glimpses, and boiling ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... human want of understanding. In the folly of Claude there is still a gleam of grace and innocence; there is refreshment in his childishness, and tenderness in his inability. But the folly of Salvator is disgusting in its very nothingness: it is like the vacuity of a plague-room in an hospital, shut up in uncleansed silence, emptied of pain and motion, ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... be observed, to advantage, the surpassing beauty of the great dome, which dwarfs the towers and steeples of the surrounding churches almost into nothingness. The general aspect of the cathedral is said to resemble St. Peter's, at Rome, but the symmetry of the dome of the latter is acknowledged to be less beautiful than that of ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various
... the dream. I cannot put the glory With which it filled my being, in a story. No one can tell a dream. Now to confess. The dream made daily life a nothingness, Merely a mould which white-hot beauty fills, Pure from some source of passionate joys and skills. And being flooded with my vision thus, Certain of winning, puffed and glorious, Walking upon this earth-top like a king, My judgment went. I did a foolish thing, I backed myself ...
— Right Royal • John Masefield
... demonstration that can be given to the contrary effect, the "collection of perceptions" which makes up our consciousness may be an orderly phantasmagoria generated by the Ego, unfolding its successive scenes on the background of the abyss of nothingness; as a firework, which is but cunningly arranged combustibles, grows from a spark into a coruscation, and from a coruscation into figures, and words, and cascades of devouring fire, and then vanishes into ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... incessantly described to her as an epoch in which tyranny and liberty equally prevail, and in which enjoyment and supremacy are to be indulged in, her desires are intensified by all her interest in an existence as yet unfulfilled; for her to marry is to be called up from nothingness into life! ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... hour or a million years would be all the same; if you could span the hour, you could span the million years. And if you could go back the million years, it was within your power to go back to the first tick of eternity, the first stir of time across the face of emptiness and nothingness—back to that initial instant when nothing as yet had happened or been planned or thought, when all the vastness of the Universe was a new slate waiting the first chalk ...
— Project Mastodon • Clifford Donald Simak
... prejudices and density. Ah! these are critical times, but I believe what a fellow-countryman of mine has already written—I believe that the women will save us. I do not fear the fate of the older peoples. I am sure that we shall not fall into nothingness from the present height of our civilization, by reason of our sensuality and vice, as all the great nations have done, heretofore. The women will rebel. The women will not allow it. But"—he added with his benign ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... scholarship at Yale, I knew that there was nothing in it for me. It turned out as my friend said. That glib reciter did become the valedictorian of the class, but stepped from the commencement stage into nothingness, and was never heard of more. Goddard became the editor of one of the most important metropolitan news- papers of the United States, and, before his early death, distinguished himself as a writer on political and ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... still, while over us and around us the spirits of the night flew past. I felt the wind of unseen wings lifting my hair; I heard the splash and gurgle of strange creatures swimming by. With my hands close locked on Barbara's arm, and wide eyes staring into nothingness, I waited for some human sound to ...
— Margaret Tudor - A Romance of Old St. Augustine • Annie T. Colcock
... dashed down into nothingness, and he uttered a low groan, which made Ingleborough start up with a wondering ...
— A Dash from Diamond City • George Manville Fenn
... doors of precious woods; the whole structure is as beautiful as a dream and as substantial as the native rock. But the visionary shapes of a long posterity, for whose home this mansion was intended, have faded into nothingness since the death of the founder's only son. The rich man gives a glance at his sable garb in one of the splendid mirrors of his drawing-room, and descending a flight of lofty steps instinctively offers his arm to yonder poverty stricken ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... afterwards, during years of nothingness, in which Arisu, a Syrian,* was chief among them, and the whole country paid tribute before him; every one plotted with his neighbour to steal the goods of others, and it was the same with regard to the gods ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 5 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... love. Yes, he has. And he has fallen in love as absolutely and as idiotically as if he were twenty-one instead of fifty-two. Now, will you kindly tell me how Mr. John Smith is going to fade away into nothingness? And, even if he finds the way to do that, shall he, before fading, pop the question for Mr. Stanley G. Fulton, or shall he trust to Mr. Stanley G. Fulton's being able to win for himself the love Mr. John Smith fondly ...
— Oh, Money! Money! • Eleanor Hodgman Porter
... beauty is a joy forever; Its loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness; but still will keep A bower quiet for us; and a sleep Full of sweet dreams, and health, and ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... went downtown to see Matthews about that pain right here and came home looking shrivelled, talking shrilly about nothing, and evading Pa's eyes. Followed months that were just a jumble of agony, X-rays, hope, despair, morphia, nothingness. ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... Laloi said. "I do not mean to say such things. I am twisted by my sorrow ..." As if to express her self-abnegation, she corkscrewed out of the clover and into a thin spiral of near-nothingness. ...
— Reluctant Genius • Henry Slesar
... What can be lasting in this world? To-day disappears in the abyss of nothingness; It is but the passing image of a dream, and ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... with an uncanny sense of prophecy, that in this marching line was depicted a new phase of man growing out of war. The individual preferment which many of them enjoyed four years ago had thinned to nothingness in the welding of this great warrior-force of comrades, who never again would quite resume their former status. For, when a clubman eats and sleeps and jokes and fights beside the waiter who used to bring his cocktail, he learns to love that man, and the love is mutual; when a millionaire ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... "outvillained villainy so far, that the rarity redeems him." And he is at last felt to be worth feeding and keeping alive for the simple reason of his being such a miracle of bespangled, voluble, impudent good-for-nothingness, that contempt and laughter cannot afford to let him die. But the roundest and happiest delivery of him comes from the somewhat waggish but high-spirited and sharpsighted Lord Lafeu, who finds him "my good window of lattice," and one whose "soul is in his clothes"; ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... dingy—oh, so dreadful! It didn't have anything around it—as some towns do—a hill, or a river, or woods. Around it was something that was just nothing. It was just walled in by the nothingness all around it. ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... They were long, and they looked out of narrow windows, and they seemed to be lighted by some internal radiance, for they shone out like lamps in a lighthouse tower. Escape them I could not, while, as I endeavoured to meet them, it was as if I shrivelled into nothingness. Never before had I realised what was meant by the power of the eye. They held me enchained, helpless, spell-bound. I felt that they could do with me as they would; and they did. Their gaze was unfaltering, having the bird-like trick of never blinking; this man could have ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... annihilated in an instant what man had lavished upon her for centuries. Nowhere, not even in what was left of ancient Rome, had he ever received such an impression of the age of the world and of the nothingness of man as among the ruins of this ridiculously modern city of San Francisco. It fascinated him, but he told himself then that he should leave it without a pang. He was a New Yorker of the seventh generation of his house, ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... between them, for all that. I open Professor Aytoun's book, and all this modern life—with its railways, its newspapers, its crowded cities, its Lancashire distresses, its debates in Parliament—fades into nothingness and silence. Scotland, from Edinburgh rock to the Tweed, stretches away in rude spaces of moor and forest. The wind blows across it, unpolluted by the smoke of towns. That which lives now has not yet come into existence; what are to-day crumbling ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... lurked this tragical anticlimax of so many a passion, and now the inanity of human nature was revealed to his successor, to whom infinite power brought Nothingness as ...
— Melmoth Reconciled • Honore de Balzac
... associated with the idea of substance. When told that God is an 'Immense Being,' without parts, and consequently unsubstantial, we try to think of such a Being; but in vain. Reason puts itself in a quandary, the moment it labours to realise an idea of absolute nothingness; yet marvellous to relate, Newton did distinctly declare his Deity 'totally destitute of body,' and urged that fact as a reason why He cannot be either seen, touched, or understood, and also as a reason why He ought not to be adored ...
— An Apology for Atheism - Addressed to Religious Investigators of Every Denomination - by One of Its Apostles • Charles Southwell
... shuddering rapidly. A peculiar feeling, as if his belly were turned into nothingness, made him want to press his fists into his abdomen. He remained shuddering drunkenly, like a drunken man who is sick, ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... priceless as was the secret Young John Cara had chosen to let die with him—the art of it was frail, frail as the titlark's song. His masterpiece, indeed, had in it the corruption of Celtic art. It could not endure its native weather, and rusted away almost to nothingness. When the late Sir Gilbert Aubyn, the famous neo-Gothic architect, was called in (1885) to restore Porthennis Church—or, as we say in Cornwall, to "restroy" it—he swept the remnants away. But ...
— News from the Duchy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... ends in the glancing water. The bright sun shone overhead; the tendrils and waving grass were gay with blossoms; birds of lovely plumage sang sweetly; and in the distance, on the one hand, fading away into nothingness, were the glorious blue mountains, and away to his right a ...
— The Adventures of Don Lavington - Nolens Volens • George Manville Fenn
... rose up, stiffly, from long sitting, and I saw that his eyes were flashing, and his face working strangely in the pale moonlight. I bade him lie down again, but he did not, and then I saw that he was surely out of his mind through the terror of the sea and the long nothingness of the voyage to which he was all unused. Then he made for me with a shout, and I saw that I must fight for my life. So I closed with him and dragged him down to the bottom of the boat, and there we two struggled, till I thought ...
— Wulfric the Weapon Thane • Charles W. Whistler
... cheerful state compared to that nameless nothingness that was her portion. For had she been dead, he could still have loved her soul; but now she had none. The soul that once she had, and, if she had then died, might have kept, had been forfeited by living on, and had passed to ...
— Lost - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... I think, is Harry; and they say the poor thing can preach; forgive me what I have done to him, oh Lord! It is the weakness of man grasping the things of this world, to leave behind for the world's nothingness," says Mr. M'Fadden, as the woman leaves the room giving an ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... daughter I receive a glad welcome. The Colonel rings a bell and an aged beldame approaches, making a deep curtsy and offering me a beaker of milk, a crusty loaf, a few venison pasties, and a cold goose stuffed with humming birds. When I have reduced these to nothingness I ask if the yellow house on the outskirts of the village is still vacant, and the Colonel replies that it is, at which unexpected but hoped-for answer I fall into a deep swoon. When I awake the aged Colonel is bending over ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Epaminondas; so many armies, so many nations, that leave him so far behind them. No particular quality can make any man proud, that will at the same time put the many other weak and imperfect ones he has in the other scale, and the nothingness of human condition to make up the weight. Because Socrates had alone digested to purpose the precept of his god, "to know himself," and by that study arrived at the perfection of setting himself at nought, he only was reputed worthy the title of a sage. Whosoever ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... the waltz came to an end, its last notes trailing off into nothingness and blowing away like a handful of leaves on a breeze. The kaleidoscopic patterns sorted themselves and turned into a circle of perambulating couples, and Gay and her partner passed the two men in ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... beauty is a joy for ever, Its loveliness increases, it will never Pass into nothingness. . . . . . . . . . . In spite of all Some shape of beauty moves away the pale From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon, Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon For simple sheep; and such are Daffodils With the green world they ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... soul, by God created Out of nothingness yet wrought As of great price, From corruption separated, Sublimated, To glorious perfection brought By skilled device; 8 Plant that in this valley growest Flowers celestial for to give Of fairest scent, Hence ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... 'creation out of nothing?' Must he not pause to think very seriously when he remembers the fundamental axiom that 'out of nothing, nothing can come,' and that nothing which has once existed can ever be completely annihilated? At any rate the necessary deduction must be that the life of man ends in that nothingness whence everything in existence has proceeded. To live and to die according to this book is not highly profitable. I can easily reconcile myself to the idea of annihilation, as a man who knows how to value a dreamless sleep after a day brimful of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... despatched she remembered that there was another hardly less important question to be answered—the proposal of the Bishop for her hand. His communication had sunk into nothingness beside the momentous news that had so greatly distressed her. The two replies lay before her—the one she had first written, simply declining to become Dr. Helmsdale's wife, without giving reasons; the second, which she had elaborated with so much ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... pretty piteousness of him is like the wailing of a lamb led to the slaughter. Grass is good to graze on, saith lambkin,—other lambs are fair to frisk with,—but alas!— neither grass nor lambs can last, and therefore as lambkin cannot always be lambkin, it bleats its end in Nothingness! But, thank God, there is something stronger and wiser in the ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... was like nothing in this world but the exultant frenzy of a plunging, tearing, roaring devil of a steam machine when it snatches a human being and spins him and whirls him till he shreds away to nothingness like a "Four o'clock" before ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... ridge, but over an awful gulf at great white fields of death. The Alps were right upon me and before me, overwhelming and commanding empty downward distances of air. Between them and me was a narrow dreadful space of nothingness and silence, and a sheer mile below us both, a floor to that prodigious hollow, lay the ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... nothingness of life, with its extremes, monstrous and profitless, is often found in the work of Tchekoff. His story "The Kiss" is but a variation of this theme,—the absurdity of life. Lieutenant Riabovich, under the influence of a chance ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... contained air. Just as such bubbles are not water, but are precisely the spots from which water is absent, so these units are not koilon, but the absence of koilon—the only spots where it is not—specks of nothingness floating in it, so to speak, for the interior of these space-bubbles is an absolute void to the highest power of vision that we can ...
— Occult Chemistry - Clairvoyant Observations on the Chemical Elements • Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater
... ... and wert thou nothingness? What is there that I fear to say? And yet, what help?... Ah, well-a-day, This ache of ...
— The Trojan women of Euripides • Euripides
... to this. If I should claim your land by word of mouth, that certainly would not make it mine; and if I were to claim it by a deed which I had made myself, and with which you had had nothing to do, the claim would be quite the same in substance—or rather, in utter nothingness. I next consider the President's statement that Santa Anna in his treaty with Texas recognized the Rio Grande as the western boundary of Texas. Besides the position so often taken, that Santa Anna while a prisoner of war, a captive, could not bind Mexico by a treaty, which ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... better take Gail over to the surgeon right away—" His voice trailed off somewhere and all was blank nothingness to me. But my last impression was that my uncle stayed behind with ...
— Vanguards of the Plains • Margaret McCarter
... their way back up the beach. The other blacks caught hold of the man-horse and pulled and tugged. There were among them those whose fondest desire was to drag the rider in the sand and spring upon him and mash him into repulsive nothingness. But the automatic pistol in his belt with its rattling, quick-dealing death, and the automatic, death- defying spirit in the man himself, made them refrain and buckle down to the task of hauling him to safety ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... This fusion of race was notable to the most ordinary physiognomist in the physique and in the morale of Mrs. Leslie. She had the speculative blue eye of the Saxon, and the passionate high nose of the Norman; she had the musing do-nothingness of the Daudlers, and the reckless have-at-every-thingness of the Montfydgets. At Mrs. Leslie's feet, a little girl with her hair about her ears (and beautiful hair it was too) was amusing herself with a broken-nosed doll. At the far end of the room, ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... was built upon the marshy islets of the Adriatic lagoons, and the city that was erected at the base of the treacherous cliffs of the Tyrrhene Sea. Solely by means of commerce both foundations rose from nothingness to splendour and power: both held the gorgeous East in fee; and both fell lamentably from their high estate. The chief point of difference in this comparison of their careers is obvious; Amalfi collapsed ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... really. Merely he saw his way clear to earning a livelihood and went after it. He was miserably educated. His knowledge of mathematics embraced arithmetic up to fractions, at which point it faded off into blissful "nothingness"—as our New-Thoughtists say. But he had an inquiring mind and a proper will to succeed. While serving his three years in the shop he bought a course in a correspondence school and studied nights, taking up, among other things, the subject of mechanical ...
— Opportunities in Engineering • Charles M. Horton
... with strong natures, endowed with the secret of leadership and command, yet able to resist the subtle temptation to which so many of the finer spirits have succumbed, it behooves us to bow and to salute in them a greatness before which all that it is customary to call by that name fades into nothingness. ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... I looked, I saw them fade and fade; until, slowly, they resolved into nothingness. Now, I looked again at the candles. They shone wanly, and, even as I watched, grew more unreal, and so vanished. The room was filled, now, with a soft, yet luminous, white twilight, like a gentle mist of light. Beyond this, I could see nothing. ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... with her in the death-dance of sin. She must go onward, ever onward, in this career of vice; she must ever again seek intoxication in the opium of sin, to save herself from the barren, colorless nothingness which awaited her; from that worst of all evils, the weariness with which the old coquette paints the terrible future, in which even she can no longer please; in which old age with a cruel hand sweeps away the flowers from the hair and the crimson ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... culminate in a moment of horror—seconds passing steadily by in regular succession, sinking into nothingness.... ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... human element in the midst of nature. Every now and then a dark patch fluttered across the shining road, and with a weird and plaintive cry, a night bird dashed abruptly from hedge to hedge, and seemingly melted into nothingness. I quitted the main road on the brow of a low hill, and embarked upon a wild expanse of moor, lavishly covered with bracken and white heather, intermingled with which were the silvery surfaces of many a pool of water. For some seconds I stood still, lost in contemplating the scenery,—its ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... strength each time it slapped, I slowly backed it. This I know: I did my best. I pulled till I burst open the ends of all my fingers; and while I pulled, the flying-jib and staysail split their cloths apart and thundered into nothingness. ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... together in the open doorway of the little house and watched the yacht's lights as they described a great curve through the darkness, then slowly faded into nothingness down the bay. Cherry ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... transitory. Its gold is but dust—its applause, a puff of noisy air—its sparkling pleasures, but polluted cisterns—its richest gifts, but bubbles, which, if they reflect the fairest colours of the rainbow, break when they are grasped, or dissolve as we approach them, into mist and nothingness! "Set your affection on things above:—the things which are seen are TEMPORAL; the things which are not ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... name during the First Crusade, and the Paynim does not change appreciably with the centuries. But he has learnt to differentiate between certain varieties of Frank, and Abdur Kad'r murmured maledictions on the Italian species as he watched the mirage slowly fading into nothingness. Though no one had told him the ultimate objective of the caravan, he felt that the presence of Italian soldiers at the nearest stopping-place put a bar to further progress. The mere fact that the ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... the plebeian roughness of Buechner or in the aristocratic gentility of Strauss, but also such a brilliant advocate of teleology as Eduard von Hartmann does not know of any other final end to offer to the world and mankind than nothingness, because he did not wish to be driven from his perception of ends in the world to the only conclusion to which it leads—namely: to the perception of an absolute intelligent and ethical personality that directs these ends. He prefers, rather, to suppose an unconsciously seeing ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... the Martians. What a lion I should be!" I looked longingly at the distant planet, the outlines of whose continents and seas appeared most enticing, but when I tried to propel myself in that direction I only kicked against nothingness. I groaned in desperation. ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss
... window again and faced me, and her eyes were glowing with the light of love. Again for the moment we were face to face with the perils that menaced us from the outside, and before that consideration, all else faded to nothingness with Zara. A little while ago she had repudiated me, but all-conquering Love had stepped in again, had overpowered her, enthralled her, and I could see that she was more than ever mine ...
— Princess Zara • Ross Beeckman
... day when I gave my heart to you, my life was yours wholly. If a doubt or a suspicion comes to you, question me. The present is yours, and you know well there is only you, you alone, in it. As for my past, if you knew what nothingness it was you would be glad. I do not think another woman made as I was, to love, would have brought to you a mind newer to love than is mine. That I swear to you. The years that were spent without you—I did not live! Let us not talk ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... in the language of man, and in that of nature. The sound 'sun', or the figures 's', 'u', 'n', are purely arbitrary modes of recalling the object, and for visual mere objects they are not only sufficient, but have infinite advantages from their very nothingness 'per se'. But the language of nature is a subordinate 'Logos', that was in the beginning, and was with the thing it represented, and was the ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... healthy visage which wore a pleasant smile and would have been describable as roguish, only ... well, the eyes of a blind man, whatever else they are, are not conducive to a roguish mien. They were eyes not visibly damaged: nice blue eyes. And they stared at nothingness. I was in the presence of a stripling who, a few weeks ago, must have owned a mobile face, and was in rapid process of developing a quite different face, a face which still might—it certainly did—grin and laugh, but which would gradually gain, had already begun ...
— Observations of an Orderly - Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital • Ward Muir
... repulsive. And then Josephine had never borne him any children; and without a son to perpetuate his dynasty, the gigantic achievements which he had wrought seemed futile in his eyes, and likely to crumble into nothingness ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... insidious poison, but never yet has the scaffold punished the assassin. My dear friend, think not of your murderer; eternity is opening to receive you; in its solemn presence, mere human vengeance shrinks into utter nothingness.' ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... approached the lady without being repelled by the offensive smirk that she assumed, no dependent ever ventured near her without the fear of the scowl that sat naturally (and fearfully, when she pleased) upon her dark and inauspicious brow. What wonder that little Jehu was crushed into nothingness, behind his own counter, under the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... through," he muttered, "and death—alone. Birth and death! Daphne, my girl—" And his voice trailed off to nothingness, and he lay staring at space, ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... light! Hippocrates is a dream; Urania is a dream; Hermes, a thought. Gold is the sun; to make gold is to be God. Herein lies the one and only science. I have sounded the depths of medicine and astrology, I tell you! Naught, nothingness! The human body, shadows! ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... practical concerns of life are mere folly.—Moreover, Buddha by propounding the three mutually contradictory systems, teaching respectively the reality of the external world, the reality of ideas only, and general nothingness, has himself made it clear either that he was a man given to make incoherent assertions, or else that hatred of all beings induced him to propound absurd doctrines by accepting which they would become thoroughly confused.—So that—and this the Sutra means ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... what puzzles them; they think what they cannot easily understand to be full of danger. Many a sceptic has stood, as he supposed, firmly rooted in the categories of the understanding which Hegel resolves into their original nothingness. For, like Plato, he 'leaves no stone unturned' in the intellectual world. Nor can we deny that he is unnecessarily difficult, or that his own mind, like that of all metaphysicians, was too much under ...
— Sophist • Plato
... exhibits. Two have weathered away almost to nothingness, some faint streaks and blotches of red earth, in which medium all the pictures have been executed, alone remaining. Those subjects that are readily decipherable are mutilated after the style of ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... the sunbeam for a moment, and then are illumined no more. Legend takes some of them, and they become pictures; and the rest, it would seem, enter again into nothingness. ...
— The Treason and Death of Benedict Arnold - A Play for a Greek Theatre • John Jay Chapman
... tell you, but from the beginning he has been Master of the Desert, and those who dwell therein. At his word the sandwind blows as it blew yesterday to cover our advance, at his word the fountains spring and tribes grow great or sink to nothingness. We think that he is a spirit who moves where he lists, and executes the decrees of heaven. At the least, though they but see him from time to time, all the dwellers in the wilderness obey him, as we do, and ill does it go, as you ...
— Morning Star • H. Rider Haggard
... wouldst gladly show Substantial services in just requital. Now to an angel what great services Have ye the power to do? To sing his praise - Melt in transporting contemplation o'er him - Fast on his holiday—and squander alms - What nothingness of use! To me at least It seems your neighbour gains much more than he By all this pious glow. Not by your fasting Is he made fat; not by your squandering, rich; Nor by your transports is his glory exalted; Nor by your faith his might. ...
— Nathan the Wise • Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
... that followed, I noticed Arletta with her arms outstretched toward me—a sign that she was betrothed to me forever. Her beautiful face was the picture of happiness and love. As I descended from the platform and started forward to clasp her in my arms the entire audience seemed to vanish into nothingness, and my head began to whirl. I turned and looked backward, and to my great astonishment and confusion beheld myself still seated upon the platform. It seemed to me that I was divided into two parts. I rubbed my eyes in amazement and looked again. There was the ...
— Born Again • Alfred Lawson
... he exclaimed, "are they not well worth being born for—born to enjoy them, and then to vanish into nothingness?" ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... a kiss one day; but soon as she beheld * My hoary hairs, though I my luxuries and wealth display'd; She proudly turned away from me, showed shoulders, cried aloud:— * 'No! no! by Him, whose hest mankind from nothingness hath made For hoary head and grizzled chin I've no especial-love: * What! stuff my mouth with cotton[FN265] ere in sepulchre ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... and art, an effective projecting cause, and a concerted goal, a mechanism which hurls to a finality which aims. But the genuine explanation must be sought elsewhere. And Mr Bergson makes this plain by two admirable analyses in which he takes to pieces the common ideas of disorder and nothingness in order to explain their meaning relative to our proceedings ...
— A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson • Edouard le Roy
... as night, floated over Walter's reeling brain; darkness, pierced by a thousand gleaming, twinkling lights, brilliant as stars, then came a void and nothingness. Slowly at last he felt himself struggling up out of the void, battling, fighting for consciousness, then came a delicious sort of languor. If this was dying, it was very pleasant. Forms seemed to be flitting before his half-opened eyelids and the hum of voices seemed to float ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... Whistler, Monet, Pissaro, all these have come into their inheritance. Those whom I brushed aside, where are they? Stevenson, so well described as the best-dressed young man that ever walked in the Burlington Arcade, has slipped into nothingness despite the journalists and Mr Sidney Colvin's batch of letters. Poor Colvin, he made a mistake, he should have ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... passed away and Quen still remained at Lu-kwo, all desire of returning either to Peking or to the place of his birth having by this time faded into nothingness. Accepting the inevitable fact that he was not destined ever to become a person with whom taels were plentiful, and yet being unwilling to forego the charitable manner of life which he had always been accustomed to observe, ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah
... lean, spasmodic arms as they traced in the air the pompous rhythm of a march that moved on silent funereal pinions through the chamber. The woman stared threateningly at the picture on the wall, the picture of the skeleton which had come from nothingness to reveal nothingness to the living. The now distraught girl, her nerves crisped by her doubts, threw herself upon the bed, her fears sorely ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... cottage, as in nearly all other homes, differences of opinion on minor questions melted into nothingness. ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... whose luminary will never set. And even the outer world of appearances and forms shines more gloriously, and has an air of reality which before it never had. It used to seem to me like the gorgeous fabric of a dream, and as if, at some unexpected moment, it might melt into air and nothingness, and I, and all men and things, with it; for there appeared to be no purpose in it; it came from nothing, it achieved nothing, and certainly seemed to conduct to nothing. Men, like insects, came and went; were born, and died, and that was all. Nothing was accomplished, nothing perfected. ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... sight of him would give me some shimmer of delight. The old time was but a thicker dream, and this is truer because more shadowy." And, the form still standing by her, she felt it was ages away; she was divided from it by a gulf of very nothingness. Her only life was, that she was lost. Her whole consciousness was merest, all ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... Into the nothingness of scorn and noise, Into the living sea of waking dream, Where there is neither sense of life, nor joys, But the huge shipwreck of my own esteem And all that's dear. Even those I loved the best Are strange—nay, they are stranger ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... entreat thee for no favor, Smallest nothingness; I will hoard thy dropt glove's savor, ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... road is getting water-logged and full of holes. The skull of a dead town grows up on the horizon. Even at this distance the light behind empty windows glares malevolently like the nothingness in vacant sockets. A horror is over everything. The horror is not so much due to the destruction as to the total absence of any signs of life. One man creeping through the landscape would make it seem more kindly. I have been in desolated towns often, but there were always ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... through a fractional block of it, to see a thronged corner of any of its yards, to hear even at a distance the stone thunder made by the smallest stampede of its red carts, irresistibly evoked a realization of one's nothingness. Never would he have believed it possible that the local should thus shrink in presence ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... her marriage, Jeanne passed calmly and peacefully, as if she were almost exhausted by the number of pleasant hours she had lately had. The morning of the eventful day she had no time to think; she was only conscious of a great sense of nothingness within her, as if beneath her skin, her flesh, and blood, and bones had vanished, and she noticed how her fingers trembled when ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... were a thousand miles of open country, with woods and houses, caves and cliffs, to which men could flee for hiding; and the danger of rebellion was less dominant. At sea, a rebellion was like some beastly struggle in one room, beyond the walls of which was everlasting nothingness. The thing had to be fought out, as it were, man to man within four walls, and God help ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... his being, seems charged with some magnetic fluid; it penetrates the hearer at every pore. Disgusted by the ingratitude of the public after his many cures, he has now returned to an impenetrable solitude, a voluntary nothingness. His all-powerful hand, which has restored a dying daughter to her mother, fathers to their grief-stricken children, adored mistresses to lovers frenzied with love, cured the sick given over by physicians, soothed the sufferings of the dying ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... lived through a great crisis has probably shared the old nurse's surprise at finding that smaller troubles, which for a while were reduced to nothingness, soon revive with our ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... the soundest reason for supposing it dominated his nights,—the idea that it would be after all, in spite of his theoretical security, an abominably sickening, uncomfortable, and dangerous thing for him to flap about in nothingness a thousand feet or so in the air. It must have dawned upon him quite early in the period of being the Greatest Discoverer of This or Any Age, the vision of doing this and that with an extensive void below. Perhaps somewhen in his youth he had looked down a great height or fallen down in some excessively ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... the former place tells a wonderful story of the strangeness of its coiling flow, and how he looked down from the church spire and saw the houses of the village rising like ghosts out of its inky nothingness. For a day and a half he remained there, weary, starving and sun-scorched, the earth under the blue sky and against the prospect of the distant hills a velvet-black expanse, with red roofs, green trees, and, later, black-veiled shrubs and gates, barns, ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... Suffragists becalmed with promises and prevent their making any public protest which might mar the Coronation festivities. So various Conciliation Bills were allowed to be read to the House of Commons and to reach Second readings at which they were passed with huge majorities. Then they came to nothingness by being referred to a Committee of the whole House. Still a hope of some solution was dangled before the oft-deluded women, who could hardly believe that British Ministers of State would be such breakers of promises and tellers of falsehoods. In November, ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... at last, through all discouragements. Between us must no type nor symbol stand, No mediator, were he more divine Than the incarnate Christ. All forms, all priests, I part aside, and hold communion free Beneath the empty sky of noon, with naught Between my nothingness and thy high heavens— Spirit with spirit. O, have mercy, God! Cleanse me from lust and bitterness and pride, Have mercy in accordance with my faith." Long time he lay upon the scorching grass, With ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... no longer to deal with Death, but with Life. We no longer believe either in the nothingness of the tomb or in salvation purchased by obligatory renunciation; we want life to be good because we want it to be fruitful. Lazarus must leave his dunghill, so that the poor may no longer rejoice at the death of the rich. All must be happy, so that the happiness of some may not be a ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... portals of two mouths instead of one, flows and ebbs the tide of the great air-sea which feeds the life of man. With the sorrow of the mother, the new life is purchased for the child; our very being is redeemed from nothingness with the pains of a death ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 1 • George MacDonald
... market gardens that are principally laid out in long, narrow beds, lost into nothingness as they dwindle down in the dim vista of perspective, and which are planted with curly endive, piquante- looking lettuces, and early cabbages; squat rows of gooseberry bushes and currant trees, with a rose set here ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... victim—." He paused—shrank from the thought presented to him—turned to a recess of the chamber—drew aside a curtain, that veiled a crucifix and a small table, on which lay a Bible and the monastic emblems of the skull and crossbones—emblems, indeed, grave and irresistible, of the nothingness of power, and the uncertainty of life. Before these sacred monitors, whether to humble or to elevate, knelt that proud and aspiring man; and when he rose, it was with a lighter step and more cheerful mien than he had worn ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... the day. At twilight he had watched the lights spring up one by one, at first like pin pricks in the distance, growing and widening until the grotesque shapes of the buildings from which they sprung had faded into nothingness, and there was left only a velvet curtain of strangely-lit stars. At a giddy distance below he could trace the blaze of Broadway, the blue lights flashing from the electric wires as the cable cars rushed back and forth, the red and violet glimmer of the sky signs. He knew ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... to those whom he persecutes He is not intelligent enough to doubt He studied until the last moment Her husband had become quite bearable His habit of pleasing had prolonged his youth I feel in them (churches) the grandeur of nothingness I gave myself to him because he loved me I haven't a taste, I have tastes It was too late: she did not wish to win Knew that life is not worth so much anxiety nor so much hope Laughing in every wrinkle of his face Learn to live without desire Life as a whole is too vast and too remote Life ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... half-pitying laugh at his expense, and has determined, [14] in a moment, never again to give credit—to be for ever on his guard, especially against his own instinctive movements. Quite unreserved, certainly, he never was again. Almost everywhere he could detect the hollow ring of fundamental nothingness under the apparent surface of things. Irony surely, habitual irony, would be the proper complement thereto, on his part. In his infallible self-possession, you might even fancy him a mere man of the world, with a special aptitude for matters ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... the hills which tumble steeply on either side soared the vast Andes of the clouds, hanging palpable in the sapphire of a summer sky. What height on height of craggy softness on those silver steeps! What rounded bosomy curves of golden vapour; what sharpened pinnacles of nothingness, spiring in ever-changing contour into the intangible blue! Man the finite, reveller in the explainable and the exact, how can his eye pierce or his speech describe the rolling robes of glory in which ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... and esprit de corps among the help. If only more concerns could be prevailed upon to bring this message of weekly or monthly good cheer to their employees, who knows but what the whole caldron of industrial unrest might not suddenly simmer down to mere nothingness? It has been said that all that is necessary is for capital and labor to understand each other. Certainly such a house organ helps the employees to ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... expected, She didn't for bric-a-brac care, So she traded the lamp For an Ecuador stamp That somebody told her was rare! This act served to madden The mind of Aladdin, But, 'spite of his impotent wrath, His manor-house vanished, To nothingness banished, And while he ...
— Grimm Tales Made Gay • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... light nor darkness. Only the Existing One breathed calmly self-contained, Naught else but him there was, naught else above, beyond; Then first came darkness hid in darkness, gloom in gloom, Next all was water, chaos indiscreet In which the One lay void, shrouded in nothingness, Then turning inward by self-developed force Of inner fervor and intense ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... master-hand of the world's greatest poet delineated it, and when living, breathing Edith Allen stepped suddenly among his shadows, seemingly so luminous, they vanished before her, as the stars pale into nothingness when the eastern sky is aglow with morning. Now, in all his horizon, she only shone, but the past seemed like ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... height and largeness, and then sinks, broken. And through the finale there quivers an illusory light. The movement is the march, the oncoming rush, of vast formless hordes, the passage of unnamed millions that surge for an instant with their cries and banners, and vanish into nothingness. It is possible that Sibelius will create another work similarly naked and intense. ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... the pink flush of evening spread along the horizon, and in it Corsica, invisible before, seemed to body itself forth from nothingness like an island of phantom peaks and headlands. Then we rose, and, in the quickly gathering dusk, took our way down among the olive-yards, and through ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... of the earth quivering through me as I pressed the button of the disintegrator and, sweeping it rapidly up and down, saw the gigantic form that confronted me melt into nothingness. ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putman Serviss
... classed as brain-mind evidence—grammar, microscopic examination of text and forms and so on—that Homer is a mere airy myth; but to do so you must be totally oblivious of the spiritual facts of style and poetry. Take these into account, and he rises with wonderful individuality from the grave and nothingness into which you have relegated him. The Illiad does not read like a single poem; there are incompatibilities between its parts. On the other hand, there is, generally speaking, the impress of a single creative genius. One master made the Homeric style. The Iliad, ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... going blind. The world which had just opened to him—the world of sunsets and forests and mountains and seas gulped to black nothingness! ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... well, Were thy last hour to come, This moment had been it; [1] yet by thy shroud I'll pull thee backward, squeeze thee to a bladder, Till thou dost groan thy nothingness away. Thou fly'st! 'Tis well. [Ghost retires. [2] I thought what was the courage of a ghost! Yet, dare not, on thy life—Why say I that, Since life thou hast not?—Dare not walk again Within these walls, on pain of the Red Sea. For, if henceforth ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... and crowd and ceaseless larum, The neighing war-horse, the air-shattering trumpet, 130 The unvaried, still-returning hour of duty, Word of command, and exercise of arms— There's nothing here, there's nothing in all this To satisfy the heart, the gasping heart! Mere bustling nothingness, where the soul is not— 135 This cannot be the sole felicity, These cannot be man's ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Baxter and taking the train from thence to El Paso—his eyes open to what he was doing, both as a self-appointed Samaritan and as a much-wanted individual in the town where Pete lay unconscious, on the very last thin edge of Nothingness. ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... whirl of the town. As if one strong set of silly interests and emotions could be effaced at will by simple change of scene, without substitution of new interests and emotions. Excess of frivolous excitement is not repaired or undone by excess of mere blankness and nothingness. The dreariness of the virtue of the villeggiatura is as noxious as the whirl of the mercenary and little virtuous period of the season. Teach young women from their childhood upwards that marriage is their single career, and it is inevitable that they should ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... this except as we die with Him. I referred to the tree grown so high and beautiful, with its roots every day for a hundred years in the grave in which the acorn died. Children of God, we must go down deeper into the grave of Jesus. We must cultivate the sense of impotence, and dependence, and nothingness, until our souls walk before God every day in a deep and holy trembling. God keep us from being anything. God teach us to wait on Him, that He may work in us all He wrought in His Son, till Christ Jesus may live out His life in us! For this may God ...
— The Master's Indwelling • Andrew Murray
... contradictories, so far from being the self-developing process which Hegel supposes, is really a self-consuming process, passing from the less to the more abstract, and terminating either in a laugh at the ultimate nothingness, or in a mood of vertiginous amazement at ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... vileness, be sensible of our misery, and annihilate ourselves, because the Divine Majesty only communicates itself to the humble. But St. Francis proposed to himself to explain that, when it pleases God to manifest Himself in some manner to a soul which is duly sensible of its nothingness, it is better impressed with its own nothingness, by the disproportion it sees between the Sovereign Being and His creature, which discovers to it a thousand imperfections which it was not previously aware of, as a ray of ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... "The Dying Cowboy's Lament," nor whistled "In the Sweet By-and-By." No; he whistled not at all, or, when he did, gay bits of jazz heard at the theatre or in a restaurant the night before. He deceived no one, least of all himself. Sometimes his voice would trail off into nothingness, but he would catch the tune and toss it up again, heavily, as though it were a ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... kept her alive. Or was it that horrible fear of death? If it was true as the priests taught—oh, yes, it must be. God could not be so cruel as to put creatures in this world to toil and suffer, and then drop back to dust, to nothingness. Even the Indians believed in another sphere, in their crude superstitious fashion, and there must be some better place as a reward for the pain here that was not one's own fault. She loved to peer beyond the skies as she thought, and to drift midway between them ...
— A Little Girl in Old Quebec • Amanda Millie Douglas
... mildly thus withstood. 'Great sir,' quoth he, 'your mighty spirit Is raised too high; this slave doth merit To be the hangman's business sooner Than from your hand to have the honour Of his destruction; I, that am A nothingness in deed and name, Did scorn to hurt his forfeit carcase, Or ill entreat his Fiddle ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... I should encourage him in nothingness. What's more, I want extra brains and hands. It's not altogether a pleasant thing, is it ... the selfishness of the ...
— Waste - A Tragedy, In Four Acts • Granville Barker
... stronger than the strongest, by craft, and courage, and will. I have knelt before him with humility, as I would kneel before one of the three black idols that stand between Bowanee and her worshippers; for his religion, like mine, teaches to change life into nothingness." ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... office. He had not come to this collapse without a fierce struggle—but the struggle was inward, and the rolling world was not agitated by it, and rolled calmly on. For of all the "ideals of life" which the world, in its rolling, inconsiderately flattens out to nothingness, the least likely to retain a profile is that ideal which depends upon inheriting money. George Amberson, in spite of his record of failures in business, had spoken shrewdly when he realized at last that money, ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... you are not wanted. On the other side this life is a nothingness so large that you will be as nothing in it. Launch yourself into it. The story that suicide is wrong and immoral is, like other things, to be taken with reservation. There is no absolute right and wrong. Suicide is sometimes the highest form ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... sea, and often spread out their mantles to dry when they reach the hills, yet must they always be sure to put their mantles on again before they leave our shores, or they will fade and vanish into nothingness, and never again reach the ...
— More Tales in the Land of Nursery Rhyme • Ada M. Marzials
... one of the most trusted of our committee, an Italian pur sang, a man whose family had suffered from Austrian misrule for half a century back. He represented a house which had been rich and noble, and had been persecuted into nothingness. No man had been louder in denunciation of the Austrian cruelty, no man apparently more sincere. There never lived a man who had more reason for sincerity. My first impression was that he must be spying upon the spies, for my opinion of his patriotism had been so lofty, ...
— In Direst Peril • David Christie Murray
... thirst To be good—to look deep in your eyes and find God, And to leave in the past the dark paths I have trod In my search after pleasure. Ah, must I go back Into folly again, to retread the old track Which leads out into nothingness? Girl, answer me, As souls answer ...
— Three Women • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... defaced, dismantled, moss-grown or sand-choked fragments of these mighty buildings would one day be the only trace, the sole memorial of a rule and of nations that would then have past away forever, even into nothingness and oblivion, scarcely was anticipated by the haughty conquerors who filled those halls with their despotic presence, and entered those consecrated gates in the pomp of triumph to render thanks for bloody victories and warlike exploits which elated their souls ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... the fact that our body, which a little while ago was imperceptible in the universe, itself imperceptible in the bosom of the whole, is now a colossus, a world, or rather a whole, in respect of the nothingness which we cannot reach? He who regards himself in this light will be afraid of himself, and observing himself sustained in the body given him by nature between those two abysses of the Infinite and Nothing, will tremble at the sight of these marvels; and ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... made; it belongs to the changing, perishable bodies which are created anew with each incarnation; and it goes down, and out, into nothingness, with the ...
— The Devil - A Tragedy of the Heart and Conscience • Joseph O'Brien
... of which the whole pile of building, and the avenues to it, have a more majestic aspect. If I enter into some details on this subject, it is that, in recalling at this hour these imposing splendors, I ask myself why they did not all at first call up my nothingness; for the Princess Amelia was the daughter of the sovereign of this palace, of these guards, of this great wealth. The court of marble, a vast hemicycle, is so called because, with the exception of a broad path around it, in which the carriages pass, it is ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... is nothing else than to stray from what is according to our nature—and in the state of perfect nature man could avoid this. Nevertheless he could not have done it without God's help to uphold him in good, since if this had been withdrawn, even his nature would have fallen back into nothingness. ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... have followed out my fate. And I propose in spite of my numerous iniquities, by the recollection of my many joys in the glories of this earth, as by corks, to float myself in the sea of nothingness until I reach the regions of the Blessed ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... paralysed form, wholly paralysed now, lay like a thing of stone. It never moved again. Consciousness was blotted out for ever in that moment. The feeble pulses of heart and brain throbbed with gradually diminishing power for a night and a day; and in the twilight of that dreadful day of nothingness the last glimmer of the light died in the lamp, and Lady Maulevrier and the burden of her sin were ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... a bright day, Jim landed at a little way station from which a single-gauge track ran off into apparent nothingness. Puffing on the single-gauge track was a "dinky" engine, coupled to a flat car. Wooden benches were fastened along one end of the car. The engineer and fireman were loading sheet iron on the other end. They looked Jim over as ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... restless, irresponsible spirit passing through him, and hypnotising him for its own ends. Of the result he has no profit, no glory, and little understanding. So the mystic also positively gloats on his own nothingness, and puts his whole genuine being in a fancied instrumentality and subordination to something else. Far more virile and noble is the sense of having actually done something, and left at least the temporary stamp of one's special will on the world. To chop a stick, to catch a fly, to pile a ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... Olive's home. It was about seven in the evening, but all things lay as in the stillness of midnight. They two might have been the only beings in the living world—all else dead and buried under the white snow. And then, lifting itself out of the horizon's black nothingness, arose the great red ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... goodness in face of a scene like this? We know nothing. The hundred fishermen die, and the unpoisoned millions live. We are shadows; we have not a single right. If I die to-night, I shall have been spent by an Almighty Power that has used me. Will He cast me to nothingness after I have fulfilled my purpose? Never. There is not a gust of this wind that does not move truly according to eternal law; there can be no injustice, for no one can judge the Judge. If I suffer the petty pang of Death while a great purpose is being wrought out, ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... moon's tender light showed faces wild and fierce, that came and went, now here—now there; it glinted on head-piece and ringed mail, and flashed back from whirling steel—a round, placid moon that seemed, all at once, to burst asunder and vanish, smitten into nothingness. He was down—beaten to his knee, deafened and half blind, but struggling to his feet he staggered out from the friendly shadow of the trees, out into the open. A sword, hard-driven, bent and snapped short upon his triple mail, the blow of a gisarm half stunned him, ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... something that in his temerity he had dared invoke—that rose now engulfing him, a puny maggot—that snatched him up and flung him headlong, shackled, before this nebulous, terrifying tribunal, where out of nothingness, out of a void, the calm, majestic features of the Patriarch took form and changed, and changed, and kept changing, and grew implacable, set with the stamp of doom. What was it—in God's name, what was it brought these sweat beads bursting to his forehead! Was he going mad—was ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... acts with rapid and beneficial effect on these rude materials, and soon elicits manifestations of intelligence, and improves and developes the moral faculties. When one sees what is done by such small means, it is impossible not to reflect with shame and sorrow upon the little, or rather the nothingness, that is accomplished when the material is of the best description, and the means are unlimited,—upon the total absence of any system throughout places of education, either public or private, and consequently at the imperfect and defective education which ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... came gently and stealthily, and it seemed long before it attained full appreciation; but just as my spirit came at length properly to feel and entertain it, the figures of the judges vanished, as if magically, from before me; the tall candles sank into nothingness; their flames went out utterly; the blackness of darkness supervened; all sensations appeared swallowed up in a mad rushing descent as of the soul into Hades. Then silence, and stillness, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... nothing. Yes, far better, instinct told him that. Miss Howland had come into his existence, radiant, pure, beautiful, and so utterly feminine; as a meteor flashing across the night pauses for a brief instant in the sky before shivering to nothingness. This simile occurred to Dan, who, though no poet, was at least a sailor and as such a student of the heavenly bodies. Yes, a meteor which had ...
— Dan Merrithew • Lawrence Perry
... the enthusiastic painter as he trod the street. "Thou art the image of the Creator's own. The innumerable forms that wander in nothingness start into being at thy beck. The dead live again; thou recallest them to their old scenes and givest their gray shadows the lustre of a better life, at once earthly and immortal. Thou snatchest back the fleeting moments of history. With then there is no past, for at thy touch all ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... shadowy yacht because he knew that he must allow for the current. Her eyes devoured him, and her heart sang. Plup-plup-plup-plup said the water. The oars plashed gently. Jenny saw the blackness gliding beside her, thick and swift. They might go down, down, down in that black nothingness, and nobody would know of it.... The oars ground against the edge of the dinghy—wood against wood, grumbling and echoing upon the water. Behind everything she heard the roaring of London, and was aware of lights, moving and stationary, high above them. How low upon ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... man? Spotted in guilty wise, A stranger unto faith, Whose tongue is stained with lies, And shalt thou count his sins—so is he lost, Uprooted by thy breath. Like to a stream by tempest tossed, His life falls from him like a cloak, He passes into nothingness, like smoke. Then spare him, punish not, be kind, I pray, To him who dwelleth in the dust, an image wrought ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... intention you had of finishing some extensive work on the Evidences of Natural and Revealed Religion. Have you let that intention go? Or are you doing any thing towards it? Make to yourself other ten talents. My letter is full of nothingness. I talk of nothing. But I must talk. I love to write to you. I take a pride in it. It makes me think less meanly of myself. It makes me think myself not totally disconnected from the better part of Mankind. I know, I am too dissatisfied with the beings around me,—but I cannot help occasionally ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... retain and maintain our sacred ties after death, another life is valueless and void, useless and unnecessary. It is a fearful sadness to think that the ones you love are to pass away into nothingness and be no more; that the sparkling eyes will be dim forever; that the rosy cheeks will no longer glow with radiant health; that the ruby lips will fade into a deathly blue, motionless and forever still; that dimpled hands and loving arms will never encircle you again, and the ...
— Tyranny of God • Joseph Lewis
... also be caused by over-feeding and may therefore require for proper treatment, not increase of the diet, but diminution of it. A low temperature, therefore, a slow pulse, languor, pallor, inanition, fatigue, good-for-nothingness, inefficiency, anorexia, anaemia, neurasthenia, etc., etc., may all be due to blocking of the body with too much food as well as to supplying it with too little. Fires may be put out by heaping up too much coal on them. To make them burn briskly ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... evenings in Switzerland, where snow-clad peaks soar above the clouds, their majestic heads rising as it were from nothingness. That night on the Ule river, this strong, strange, misty fog was very remarkable—such a contrast to the intense heat of the day, so great a contrast to the marvellous clearness which had preceded it, so mystic after ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie |
