"Nonentity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... well as the conduct of the war; as Treasurer of the Navy he managed its finances, and, as President of the India Board, he sought to control the affairs of that Empire. As for the War Office, it was a petty office, controlled by a nonentity, Sir Charles Yonge, who was soon to be transferred ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... day. It is difficult to tell whether this indifference to the weighty affairs of government was as complete as it appears to us at this distance of time. Certain facts recorded in the official chronicles of that date go to prove that, except in name and external pomp, the king was a nonentity. The real power lay in the hands of the nobles and generals, and Bel-sharuzur, the king's son, directed affairs for them in his father's name. Nabonidus meanwhile resided in a state of inactivity at his palace of Tima, and it is possible ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... that room had changed. Wright might have been a nonentity for all he counted. Sampson was another man—a stranger to me. If he had entertained a hope of freeing himself from his band, of getting away to a safer country, he abandoned it at the very sight of these men. There was power here ...
— The Rustlers of Pecos County • Zane Grey
... government, and yet not pray for the Prelates themselves. They can pray very fervently and distinctly for the British and Irish parliaments, and yet not at all pray for the bishops, necessary and essential members there. And what is all this but to pray for a nonentity, a mere creature of their own mind? They have neither king nor parliament in their abstracted and imaginary sense, but do clearly distinguish themselves out of both. We might refer them to that famous and faithful embassador, ...
— Act, Declaration, & Testimony for the Whole of our Covenanted Reformation, as Attained to, and Established in Britain and Ireland; Particularly Betwixt the Years 1638 and 1649, Inclusive • The Reformed Presbytery
... kind has always been necessary in the world, my friend," said the Professor calmly; "Either in the shape of a deity or a king. A wood and straw Nonentity is better than an incarnated fleshly Selfishness. Will you give me supper before ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... death was a stroke of good luck that he scarcely deserved. He died without a moment's pain, with a merry thought in his head, perhaps, while many another better man has to linger in torture for weeks. No, Bormann, the best I can say about Winkler is that his death makes one nonentity the less ...
— The Lamp That Went Out • Augusta Groner
... me to be colourless in mind as well as in feature. She impressed me neither favourably nor the reverse. She was a nonentity. It was easy to see that she was passionately devoted both to her husband and to her little son. Her light grey eyes wandered continually from one to the other, noting every little want and forestalling it if possible. He was kind to her also in his bluff, boisterous ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... has dignity, ability, character, and if he is coming out as a genius he will be quite the style. There is one woman who could do the honors perfectly,—madame,—and she feels as if she could almost wring the life out of the small nonentity who has usurped her place, for of course Floyd would soon have cared for madame if she ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... the ball-room. Mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, finding their highest enjoyment in the dance, bid farewell to books, to quiet culture, to all the amenities of home. The father will, after a while, go down into lower dissipations. The son will be tossed about in society, a nonentity. The daughter will elope with a French dancing-master. The mother, still trying to stay in the glitter, and by every art attempting to keep the color in her cheek, and the wrinkles off her brow, attempting, without any success, ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... experience in the outside world is educating her, for she is studying conditions. She sees that she is forced to compete with those who have full political rights while she herself is a political nonentity. She finds that she must contend with and protect herself against conditions which are more often political than economic, thus forcing upon her the conviction that she too is entitled to be a voter. She sees that politics, business and industrial life generally are so united that ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... martial garb of the Romans. His son, known only by his slighting nick-name of Caracalla, had reigned during six years of insane lust and cruelty, before the knife of an angry soldier avenged the dignity of the Roman name. The nonentity Macrinus had filled the dangerous throne for a single year before he also met a bloody end, and made room for the most grotesque of all monarchs, the unspeakable Heliogabalus with his foul mind and his painted face. He in turn was ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... very much that I have little chance of being put under the protection of your laws, since, whatever may be the impression of those who have seen me, every one else must inevitably pronounce me non-existent; and a nonentity can hardly be the subject of legal wrong or have ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... But flesh and blood. Like shadows flee his days, He marks not how they vanish from his gaze, Suddenly, he must die— He droppeth, stunned, into nonentity. ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... will terminate in time. Its manifestation in time is not a creation; it is an effluence from the eternal fount of spirit. Its disappearance from the stage of time is not an extinction of essence—a reduction to nonentity; it is only a refluence into its original source. As an emanation from the supreme, eternal spirit, it is from everlasting to everlasting. Neither can it be said to be of finite dimensions; on the contrary, ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... take it away would be a difficult matter. So what are we to do? To let the negro exercise the full and unrestrained measure of his suffrage, would, in some communities, reduce the white man to the position of political nonentity. And no law, no cry about the rights of a down-trodden race, no sentiment expressed abroad, could force the white man to submit quietly to this degradation. Upon the negro's head the poetry of New England has placed a wreath of sentiment. No poet has placed a wreath upon the brow of the ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... theatre until a much later period. Hence the French name parterre for the pit—par terre, upon the ground. The name parquet, which is given to that part of a theatre in America, is not French, and is no word at all, but a miserable affected nonentity of sound.] ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... us never despise any one. Contempt is the resource of parvenus, prigs, ugly folk, and fools; it is the mask behind which nonentity shelters itself, and sometimes blackguardism; it dispenses with mind, judgment, and good-will. All humpbacked persons are contemptuous; all crooked noses wrinkle with disdain when ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... in public," ought to be the maxim of a married establishment. For both the married couple to lose honor, esteem, consideration, respect and all that is worth living for in society, is to become a nonentity. ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... 465. He attached himself to the party of Ricimer, and before long became a conspicuous captain of foederati After the death of Ricimer (18th August, 472), there was a series of rapid revolutions in the Roman State. Olybrius, the then reigning nonentity, died in October of ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... as much like a Body as possible. His chief wish is to turn over on the other side and sleep for another seven hours or so, but one of those people is standing respectfully beside his bed and though Oliver blinks eyes at him reproachfully, he will not vanish back into his proper nonentity—he remains standing there—obsequious words come out of ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... speak slightingly of his wife, and say what a fool he had been to marry a poor, silly nonentity, when he might have wedded ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... he was dumb and a nonentity; he had been this evening so remarkably stupid that Bathilde had hardly noticed him ...
— The Conspirators - The Chevalier d'Harmental • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... plainly show that he came from the Father. His whole life was such as to render the virgin birth almost a necessity, as I see it. How otherwise can we explain him? And from a study of the Gospels I simply can not avoid the conclusion that his knowledge of the allness of God rendered matter such a nonentity to him that he overcame all material laws, overcame the world of matter, and even at the last dematerialized his material body. It's an astonishing thought—and yet, who can show that it is not true? There are some things that reason insists on our ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... not," said Miss Anna, trying to make the most of the compliment, "I am nobody at all, just a mere nonentity, Harriet." ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen
... a few armed police, but was in no sense independent. Its position in India was analogous to that of British capitalists in America who are operating a mine or factory and have been authorized to police their property. The mighty house of Tamerlane had become a political nonentity, the empire of the Great Mogul was divided among nominal viceroys who were really independent sovereigns, gorgeous but indolent. The teeming millions of India were, for the most part, as unfitted by nature and occupation for the fatigues of war, as were the ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... having assisted the Aragonese to recover Saragossa. In 1138 'Ali III. was defeated by Alphonso VII. of Castile and Leon, and in 1139 by Alphonso I. of Portugal, who thereby won his crown, and Lisbon was recovered by the Portuguese in 1147. 'Ali III. was a pious nonentity, who fasted and prayed while his empire fell to pieces under the combined action of his Christian foes in Spain and the agitation of the Muwahhadis or "Almohades'' (q.v.) in Morocco. After 'Ali's ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... respect. Why this express prohibition, if the law-making power cannot abolish slavery? A stately farce, indeed, formally to construct a special clause, and with appropriate rites induct it into the Constitution, for the express purpose of restricting a nonentity!—to take from the lawmaking power what it never had, and what cannot pertain to it! The legislatures of those States have no power to abolish slavery, simply because their Constitutions have expressly taken away that power. The people of Arkansas, Mississippi, &c., well knew the competency ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... not re-entered society with the intention of subsiding into a nonentity, and he therefore took the opportunity, a few minutes after sunset, just as his companions were falling into the dance, to beg the favour of being allowed to address his sovereign ...
— English Satires • Various
... no soul, nor body, but the wall, On which the moonbeams fell in silvery showers, Chequered with all the tracery of the Hall; He shuddered, as no doubt the bravest cowers When he can't tell what 'tis that doth appal. How odd, a single hobgoblin's nonentity Should cause more fear than a whole ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... Herbert began to find his position at home far from agreeable. His father had sunk into a mere nonentity through his mother's superior energy. Hence, in her hands rested the happiness or misery of all connected with the household. It soon became evident that her grand project was to effect a marriage between Lady Elizabeth Plympton and Herbert; and when she ...
— Tales for Young and Old • Various
... wife of the preceding. Born Isaure d'Aldrigger, in 1807, at Strasbourg. An indolent blonde, fond of dancing, but a nonentity from both the moral and the intellectual standpoints. ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... comfortable about it they should start fairly equal. Take your case, for instance. You brought your husband a large fortune, your people were well known in society, your family interest I have heard was useful to him in his parliamentary career. So far as I am concerned, I am just now a hopeless nonentity. Your brother has everything—I have not shown myself capable even of earning my own living except in a way which could not possibly bring any credit upon anybody. And beyond this, Lady Lescelles, as you must know, recent events have set a good many people's tongues ...
— Anna the Adventuress • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... only intimations which man has of Him are confessedly false projection of ignorance. For all practical purposes this hypothetical deity—for the very existence of Brahm is only assumed as a working hypothesis by the theosophist—is a nonentity to the worshipper. How can a being lend itself to a devout soul in worship when it is rigidly devoid of every quality that can inspire or attract the soul? This very fact has led the ordinary Hindu to seek and develop something else as an object of his devotion. ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... uncle, that he is a nonentity. Apart from his bad temper he is really a strong man, even as you see him here, with his small white and shining head like a baby's, that seems even smaller above his immense corporation; but it carries something ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Company of Holland, the elder sister of that of England, now a nonentity, though once the most extensive and most flourishing commercial establishment that ever existed, long ago published, or permitted to be published, a very extensive series of voyages of commerce and discovery, called Voyages ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. VIII. • Robert Kerr
... it is very hard to guess. Perhaps there was some real admiration of Jean's beauty, and it seems to have been his desire that his wife should be a nonentity, as was shown in his subsequent choice of Charlotte of Savoy. Now Jean was in feature very like her sister Isabel, Duchess of Brittany, who was a very beautiful woman, but not far from being imbecile, and Louis had never seen Jean display any superiority of intellect ...
— Two Penniless Princesses • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Ehrenthal, however, tried in vain to keep up a conversation with him. Fink contrived not to appear aware of his presence, without, however, being in any way rude. Every one felt it to be in the nature of things; and Ehrenthal himself humbly acted the part of nonentity assigned to him, and consoled himself by eating ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... four of the neighbors over to a corner, where, whilst his eyes rested on Dennis with a most withering expression of scorn, he exclaimed—"Here, hand me that manual, and get out o' my way, you illiterate nonentity and ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... planet ten years ago as a man of pronounced and outspoken convictions. I have managed to keep myself alive here by becoming an inoffensive nonentity. If I continue in this course, it will be only at the cost of my self-respect. Beginning tonight, I am going to state and maintain positive opinions on the relation between this planet ...
— Lone Star Planet • Henry Beam Piper and John Joseph McGuire
... thought them, with the exception of the Empress, a common-looking set of people. They walked round the oblong arena in the Palais de l'Industrie exactly as circus people do round the track at the Hippodrome. The most interesting figure was old Jerome—interesting, not for himself, as he was a nonentity, but as the brother of the most ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... Should its ports be to-day opened, should our armies fall back to their primary bases of operation, should European Powers formally declare that a slave republic exists, yet the new nation would be practically a nonentity. Does any one suppose that the United States would yield Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, Arkansas, New Orleans, and the Mississippi; that the freemen of Western Virginia would be forsaken; that Fortress Monroe and Port Royal would be abandoned? How ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... exclusively exemplified in any one individual. To be exclusively any one of these would be to be a caricature rather than a character.[2] But to be no one of these types to any degree at all is to be no character at all, is to be socially a nonentity, a minus quantity; it is to be determined by the vicissitudes of chance or circumstance; it is to be a succession of vacillations rather than a distinctive self-determined personality. Each of these types, moreover, if not extreme, has its specific excellences, and their various ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... aware that mermaids do not exist; why speak of them as if they did? How can you find interest in speaking of a nonentity?" ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... Parisian-looking dresses suggested the possession of a dangerous energy. It was a source of irritation to the Baroness that in this country it should seem to matter whether a little girl were a trifle less or a trifle more of a nonentity; for Eugenia had hitherto been conscious of no moral pressure as regards the appreciation of diminutive virgins. It was perhaps an indication of Lizzie's pertness that she very soon retired and left the Baroness on her brother's hands. Acton talked ...
— The Europeans • Henry James
... could resist. It was after a day of severe trials he proposed that we should go off by ourselves for a couple of nights in search of game, of which we were much in need. The men were easily persuaded to halt and rest. Samson had become a sort of nonentity. Dysentery had terribly reduced his strength, and with it such intelligence as he could boast of. We started at daybreak, right glad to be alone together and away from the penal servitude to which we were condemned. We made for the Sweetwater, not very far from the foot of the South ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... people of his patriotic services. It was moreover expected that, thus warned by the patriots, the President would seize the first occasion to infuse energy into his Cabinet. But there is a Mr. Usher, a docile nonentity, made Secretary of the Interior; of course the Secretary of State ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... inexistence[obs3]; nonexistence, nonsubsistence; nonentity, nil; negativeness &c. adj.; nullity; nihility[obs3], nihilism; tabula rasa[Lat], blank; abeyance; absence &c. 187; no such thing &c. 4; nonbeing, nothingness, oblivion. annihilation; extinction &c. (destruction) 162; extinguishment, extirpation, Nirvana, obliteration. V. not exist &c. 1; have no ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... and I regret that my mother is a famous actress. If she were an ordinary woman I think I should be a happier man. What could be more intolerable and foolish than my position, Uncle, when I find myself the only nonentity among a crowd of her guests, all celebrated authors and artists? I feel that they only endure me because I am her son. Personally I am nothing, nobody. I pulled through my third year at college by the skin of my teeth, as they say. I have neither money nor brains, and ...
— The Sea-Gull • Anton Checkov
... of this mighty Christian philanthropy which, in beginning amid the din of battle, has steadily marched on through every opposing influence, and lifted a race from weakness to strength, from poverty to wealth, from moral and intellectual nonentity to place and power among the nations ...
— Memories of Childhood's Slavery Days • Annie L. Burton
... of the Eleatics, who, it will be remembered, worked out on abstract lines a theory of one indivisible, eternal, immovable Being. Democritus, on the contrary, declared for two co-equal elements, the Full and the Empty, or Being and Nonentity. The latter, he maintained, was as real as the former. As we should put it, Body is unthinkable except by reference to space which that body does not occupy, as well as to space which it does occupy; and conversely Space is unthinkable except by reference to body actually ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... fight again, or submit to a union between France and Spain, Louis XIV. becoming, by the death without issue of the Spanish king, sovereign of both countries, to the upsetting of the European balance of power. Spain had become a nonentity; she had no money, no navy, no commerce, no manufactures, and a population reduced by emigration, and by the expulsion of Jews and Moors, to about seven millions: nothing remained to her but that ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... election. This time he was successful. During the following winter he sat in the Legislature of Illinois; a huge, uncouth, mainly silent member, making apparently no impression whatever, very probably striking the educated members as a nonentity ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... is in the natural world, such is fame in the intellectual,—both requiring an atmosphere in order to become perceptible. Hence the fame of Michel Angelo is to some minds a nonentity; even as the Sun itself ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... an unnecessary expenditure of nerve force by treating your adversary—with all due respect to him—as a nonentity. Whatever brilliant achievements he may accomplish, go on quietly playing your own game. There is always the probability that sooner or later he will make enough mistakes to bring him back to you. It is the steadier player who plays his own game from the ...
— The Complete Golfer [1905] • Harry Vardon
... low that she saw no degradation in going off to fight French or British wars, while at home remaining a mere political nonentity. ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... a circle made on the turf. The master of the gang commenced, and after much stamping with his foot, and the gentleman warmly exhorting him to cry aloud, like the roaring of a lion, he endeavoured to call forth nonentity into existence. Asking him if he could do it, he answered, "I am not strong enough." They were all asked the same question, which received the same answer. The visitor commenced. Every eye was fixed upon ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... seldom to this room again, and when she went she stood always in the background, far more in fear that some one would address her than that she should meet with neglect. She was used to neglect, and to being regarded as a nonentity, and aught else discomfited her. All her pleasure was to hear what was said, though 'twas not always of the finest wit—and to watch Clorinda play the queen among her admirers and her slaves. She would not have dared to speak of Sir John Oxon frequently—indeed, ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... dear Ansard, it is however of no consequence. Nothing is more difficult to attain, yet nothing is more easy to describe, than a good dinner. I was once reading a very fashionable novel by a very fashionable bookseller, for the author is a mere nonentity, and was very much surprised at the accuracy with which a good dinner was described. The mystery was explained a short time afterwards, when casually taking up Eustache Eude's book in Sams's library, I found, that the author had copied it out exactly from the injunctions of that ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat
... during the last fortnight; and would think himself distanced in the race with his lunarian rivals, if his numbers did not contain three distinct and entirely new theories of the system of the universe, and at least one hitherto unobserved piece of evidence of the nonentity of God. ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... advice Lady Harriet Vandeleur gave Cecil. Very good for mediocre people, I dare say; but it wouldn't suit me. There are some people, you know, that won't iron down for the hardest rollers. M'effacer? No! I'd rather any day be an ill-bred originality than a well-bred nonentity." ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... either of the two? As an au fait in the female temperament, I shall wager that it is nine out of ten that if you spoof this mercenary young minx into believing that you are merely a native impecunious nonentity, and not to be shot at with powder, she will instantaneously drop pursuing such a ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... longer fight now for one and now for another Chinese general or prince. They had promised loyalty to the Chinese emperor, but not to any prince. No one doubted that the Chinese emperor was a complete nonentity and no longer played any part in the struggle for power. It was evident that the murders would continue until one of the generals or princes overcame the rest and made himself emperor. Why should not the Huns have ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... the mother and her three youngest daughters, all draped in deepest black, arrived at Rose Hill prepared to find fault with everything which savored at all of the "horrid country." Even Eugenia sank into nonentity in the presence of the cold city-bred woman, who ignored her existence entirely, notwithstanding that she loudly and repeatedly expressed so ...
— Dora Deane • Mary J. Holmes
... a national navy; no naval war is worth what it costs, and merchants should protect themselves. He says, too, that the word "nation" is an invention of the grammarians, made to save the trouble of circumlocution, a nonentity! Adam Smith is, as might be expected, far removed from such absurdities. (Compare Wealth of Nations, IV, ch. 2, and the end of the fourth book.) But, even he is of opinion that men, in the study ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... the next day of arrests among the ladies of the Princes' party. The two Princesses of Conde were permitted to retire to Chantilly, but then the Dowager-Princess was known to be loyal, and the younger one was supposed to be a nonentity. Madame de Longueville was summoned to the Palace, but she chose instead to hide herself in a little house in the Faubourg St. Germain, whence she escaped to Normandy, her husband's Government, hoping to raise the people there to demand his release ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... deter Prussia by chastising Austria. To work, gentlemen! In six weeks, at latest, we must give Austria a decisive battle which will make it depend solely on my will whether I permit the house of Hapsburg to reign longer or bury it in the nonentity of inglorious oblivion!" ...
— A Conspiracy of the Carbonari • Louise Muhlbach
... colleague of Julius Caesar, but a mere cipher in office; hence his name became a household word for a nonentity. ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... might seem,—that strange passion for nonentity, to which the Greek was so oddly liable, to which the human mind generally might be thought to have been constitutionally predisposed; for the doctrine of "The One" had come to the surface before in old Indian dreams of self-annihilation, which had been ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... the direction of Doctor Cockburn's house. Mrs. Cockburn was a plain little middle-aged woman with parted gray hair and sweet, faded eyes. In the life of the place she was a nonentity, and her tastes were homely and commonplace, ...
— Conjuror's House - A Romance of the Free Forest • Stewart Edward White
... settled habit of life. So it became her fondest desire to see that Cheyenne's boy, Little Jim, should be brought up in a home that he would always cherish and respect. Aunt Jane's husband Frank Lawrence, had no patience with Cheyenne's aimless meanderings. Frank Lawrence was a hard-working, silent nonentity. Aunt Jane was the real manager of the ranch, and incidentally of Little Jim, and her husband was more than content that ...
— Partners of Chance • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... of an existence is it for any human being, with power to do otherwise, to pass through life a worthless, good-for-nothing nonentity, living for self, shirking the sacred duties of paternity, defrauding nature and God and sowing corruption where he might be laying the foundation of a race that may never die? There is no one to whom he has done good and no one owes him a tear when his barren carcass ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... she think he was—a fool, a loafer, a uniformed nonentity? Didn't she know that for every half hour of pinlighting, he got a minimum of two months' recuperation in ...
— The Game of Rat and Dragon • Cordwainer Smith
... he disbelieves you; but when a few days afterwards he reads in his newspaper of how some howling nonentity has just been made a peer, or a member of the Government, the incredible sentence he has heard recurs to him. When in the course of the next twelve months five or six other nonentities have enjoyed this sort of promotion (one of whom perhaps ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... the minister's salary, furnish the edifice, support social movements that would tend to increase membership, and sustain the religious services; but, were she a machine, minus brains, choice, or will, she could be no more completely a nonentity when the pastor was to be chosen, the amount of his salary fixed, or any matters of finance or ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... Olmuetz received the three prisoners. Here he could receive no letters; he could read no paper; he was harshly told that he should never again know anything of what was going on in the outside world; that he was now a complete nonentity, a being known only by a number, and that no person in Europe knew where he was nor ever should know until ...
— Lafayette • Martha Foote Crow
... Edinburgh, Madrid, Vienna, Berlin, and Petersburg, liable to every mode of positive temptation and distraction, which besiege human life in high-viced and luxurious communities. Here, therefore, it is a mockery to talk of discipline; of a nonentity there can be no qualities; and we need not ask for the description of the discipline in situations where discipline there can be none. One slight anomaly I have heard of as varying pro tanto the uniform features of this ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... one way or another for seven years, the most trying and decisive in a boy's life. He had not gone to the bad, evidently, and to his credit he was homeward bound. His history was something out of the ordinary; yet beyond the circle where he worked and was considered a hard taskmaster he was a nonentity—a star in the milky way, a star whose faint rays, without individual brilliancy, ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... categories. In ordinary life they were men of quiet, grave, contemplative demeanour, but their faces could flush and their blood boil when they discussed the all-important question, whether it is possible to pass logically from Pure Being through Nonentity to the conception of Development and ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... a pair of those smoked-glass spectacles so much affected by sight-seers at the Fair, and I was forced to smile at the strange metamorphosis of her face when she put them on and turned it toward me. With the small, sharp eyes, her most characteristic feature, concealed, the face became almost a nonentity. ...
— Against Odds - A Detective Story • Lawrence L. Lynch
... Cicero, p, 19. "In the latter we have not merely nothing, to denote what the point should be; but no indication, that any point at all is wanting."—Churchill's Gram., p. 373. So the word nothing, when taken positively for nonentity, or that which does not exist, may be followed by ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... equality which reigns between lovers ought never to appear in the case of husband and wife, under pain of undermining the whole fabric of society and entailing terrible disasters. If it is painful to see a man whom nature has made a nonentity, how much worse is the spectacle of a man of parts brought to that position? Before very long you will have reduced Macumer to the mere shadow of a man. He will cease to have a will and character of his ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... which I could guess, but which I did not know for certain. True, the slavery and abasement in which she held me might have given me (such things often do so) the power to question her with abrupt directness (seeing that, inasmuch as I figured in her eyes as a mere slave and nonentity, she could not very well have taken offence at any rude curiosity); but the fact was that, though she let me question her, she never returned me a single answer, and at times did not so much as notice me. That ...
— The Gambler • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... you to come now, Mr. Amherst," she began haughtily; but a glance from her husband reduced her to a heaving pink nonentity. ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... we are introduced to the Dean, a nonentity, and to Minor Canon Crisparkle, a muscular Christian in the pink of training, a classical scholar, and a good honest fellow. Jasper gives Edwin a dinner, and gushes over "his bright boy," a lively lad, full of chaff, but also full of confiding affection and tenderness of heart. Edwin admits that ...
— The Puzzle of Dickens's Last Plot • Andrew Lang
... nonentity, Mr. Langham, the Elsmeres' friend? Ridiculous! What attraction could a man of that type have ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... had gone into Parliament, possibly with the idea of making his home life seem less dull; at any rate it redeemed his career from insignificance, for no man whose death can produce the item "another by-election" on the news posters can be wholly a nonentity. Henry, in short, who might have been an embarrassment and a handicap, had chosen rather to be a friend and counsellor, at times even an emergency bank balance; Francesca on her part, with the partiality which a clever and lazily-inclined woman often feels for a reliable fool, ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... time arrived when the higher classes preferred the freshwater fish of Orchies in Flanders, and even those of the Lyonnais. Thus we see in the thirteenth century the barbel of Saint-Florentin held in great estimation, whereas two hundred years later a man who was of no use, or a nonentity, was said to resemble a barbel, "which is neither ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... was responsibility, actual and deeply significant, calling for the exercise of tact, courage, and immutable firmness. The particular task was not one which he would have coveted, and yet he welcomed it. Anything,—anything to assuage in him that sense of ineptitude, of being ignored, a titled nonentity! ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... in power were so foolish as to choose a weak man for its head, it would cease to be in power. Its judgment is its life. Suppose in 1859 that the Whig party had determined to set aside both Earl Russell and Lord Palmerston and to choose for its head an incapable nonentity, the Whig party would probably have been exiled from office at the Schleswig-Holstein difficulty. The nation would have deserted them, and Parliament would have deserted them, too; neither would have endured to see a secret negotiation, on which depended ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... exchanged long and in a way searching glances. Harrison was, as always, the lank and cadaverous nonentity, the man of negative suspicions and infinite reserves. His eyes were fixed upon the carpet. He was a ...
— The Profiteers • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... had not re-entered society with the intention of subsiding into a nonentity; and he therefore took the opportunity, a few minutes after sunset, just as his companions were falling into the dance, to beg the favour of being allowed to address his sovereign only ...
— The Voyage of Captain Popanilla • Benjamin Disraeli
... be; from supposing that when it signifies to exist, and when it signifies to be some specified thing, as to be a man, to be Socrates, to be seen or spoken of, to be a phantom, even to be a nonentity, it must still, at bottom, answer to the same idea; and that a meaning must be found for it which shall suit all these cases. The fog which rose from this narrow spot diffused itself at an early period over ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... girl a nonentity, or is she a deep genius?' said Jane to herself as she walked home. 'I cannot make her out. Now for the trial of power! If Theodora Martindale yields to the Fotheringhams now, and deserts Georgina, it will be a confirmation ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... that she quite failed to understand how his eccentric behavior could be harmonized with those principles of teaching which she had imbibed at the state normal school in itself lifted him nearer to equality with her. A public nuisance is really more respectable than a nonentity. ...
— The Brown Mouse • Herbert Quick
... foolish argument that the average newspaper man would make," said Quinlan scornfully. "Mallard is news because the newspapers make news of him—and for no other reason. Let them quit, and he isn't news any more—he's a nonentity, he's nothing at all, he's null and he's void. So far as public opinion goes he will cease to exist, and a thing that has ceased to exist is no longer news—once you've printed the funeral notice. Every popular thing, every conspicuous thing in the world is born of notoriety ...
— The Thunders of Silence • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... other having struck out for himself. And Miss Eliza Leverett was weakly. Like many women of that period, when all hope of marrying and having a home of her own was past, she sank down into a gentle nonentity and dreamed of Cousin Chilian. Not that she had expected to captivate him, but life with some one like that would set one on ...
— A Little Girl in Old Salem • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... back from her teeth. Bristow, going beyond surface indications, estimated her at her true worth: "Too much indulged; overshadowed, perhaps, by some older member of the family; but capable of big things, even charm. She's far from being a nonentity. She ...
— The Winning Clue • James Hay, Jr.
... One can well imagine, therefore, that the almost total deprivation from temporal power, and the neutralized allegiance of so many of his Italian subjects, must be most galling and heart-breaking to him. The Pope, indeed, is almost a nonentity at home; yet we cannot but feel that this alienation between Italy and her spiritual father is for the real good of the State. It has ever been the policy of the Papacy to keep the people in poverty and superstitious ignorance. The priesthood has shamefully ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... Egmont, with every appearance of graciousness. Alva as yet bore only the title of Captain-General, but the king had bestowed on him full powers civil and military; and the Duchess of Parma, though still nominally regent, found herself reduced to a nonentity. Alva's first step was to place strong Spanish garrisons in the principal cities, his next to get the leaders who had been marked for destruction into his power. To effect this he succeeded by fair and flattering words in securing the presence of ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... when he got back to the intimacy of his woodland, and that was because the people of Pine, with few exceptions—though they liked him and greatly admired his outdoor wisdom—regarded him as a sort of nonentity. Because he loved the wild and preferred it to village and range life, they had classed him as not one of them. Some believed him lazy; others believed him shiftless; others thought him an Indian in mind and ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey
... heard, as yet, but one side of the question; and if I speak freely to you, it is only to give you the advantage of my experience from having mixed with the world. I am true to my party, and, as a man, I must belong to a party, or I become a nonentity. But were I in a condition so unshackled that I might take up or lay down my opinions as I pleased, without loss of character—as a woman may, for instance—so little do I care for party—so well balanced do I know the right and the wrong to be ...
— Snarleyyow • Captain Frederick Marryat
... was found and all explanations made. I had therefore been simply fighting his battles when I pointed out what I thought to be the weak place in their present theory, and, sore as I felt in contemplation of my seemingly heartless action, I was not the unimpressionable, addle-pated nonentity I must have ...
— The Woman in the Alcove • Anna Katharine Green
... one which, probably, most people would endorse. But it is open to two objections. First it is difficult to see how an activity, however un-"transparent," can be directed towards a nothing: a term of a relation cannot be a mere nonentity. Secondly, no reason is given, and I am convinced that none can be given, for the assertion that dream-objects are not "there" and not "given." Let us take the ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... got power over an eight-armed octopus even: so am merely a very helpless loving nonentity which merges itself most happily in you, and begs to be lifted to no pedestal at all, ...
— An Englishwoman's Love-Letters • Anonymous
... wife, a graceful nonentity who, having never done a stroke of work in her life, was perpetually breaking down, and being obliged to rest expensively under the supervision of fashionable doctors. She was now in Hampstead, enclosed in a pale green chamber, living on milk and a preparation called "Marella," and enjoying ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... the village, and thence through woods and meadows, and giving access within a mile on either side to park-lands attached to the big country houses of wealthy people to whom the village cobbler was a nonentity and a person of a different order of beings from themselves. They were not to know, these rich neighbors, that the cobbler was bringing for protection to his humble home a child destined to be a Prime Minister of the country. Prime Minister in a crisis ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot
... suspense, something arrested on the point of transition from nonentity to absolute being,—wholly neither, but on the confines of both, which is the condition of its being perceptible to us. We are able to feel and use heat, because it is not entirely heat; and we see light only when it is mixed and diluted with its opposite. The condition of motion is that there ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... caught up the paper and stared at the paragraph he pointed to. Jim Driscoll—that pitiful nonentity, with his stout mistrustful commonplace wife! It seemed extraordinary that the government should have hunted up such insignificant people. And immediately she had a great vague vision of the splendours they were going to—all the banquets and ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... more obliging gossoon in the wide worrld than this same Jack Stormways, and ye can depind on that!" exploded Jimmy, thinking it about time he injected his personality into the conversation, since he did not wish to be an utter nonentity. ...
— Motor Boat Boys Down the Coast - or Through Storm and Stress to Florida • Louis Arundel
... the negro so totally a nonentity in politics as in Mississippi, and yet nowhere in the South is there a colored institution so heartily commended as is Tougaloo University by the white Mississippians. This seems odd, hardly credible. Tougaloo is not a State institution. ...
— The American Missionary, Volume XLII. No. 7. July 1888 • Various
... Genestas, to whom she made a very deferential courtesy, while she scanned him from head to foot. A thoughtful and dejected expression gave a harsh look to the soldier's face. In the dialogue between master and servant the latter had appeared to him in the light of a nonentity; and although he regretted the fact, this revelation had lessened the high opinion that he had formed of the man whose persistent efforts to save the district from the horrors of cretinism had won ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... a villain, or madman, he rises to the rank of a man, a position few can fill. Thus he triumphs over Fortune, he dares to look her in the face; he depends on himself alone, and when he has nothing left to show but himself he is not a nonentity, he is somebody. Better a thousandfold the king of Corinth a schoolmaster at Syracuse, than a wretched Tarquin, unable to be anything but a king, or the heir of the ruler of three kingdoms, the sport of all who would scorn his poverty, wandering from court to court ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... emperors, queens, prophets and priests, we have one that says he is nobody, a nonentity. One that was never born, and one that was born of her grandmother, and another dropped by the devil flying over the world. One has had the throat cut out and put in wrong, so that what is swallowed passes ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... giving up the problem as something beyond his reach,—'Don't trouble yourself if you hear me stirring in the night,' he said; 'I am often mighty restless.' And rolling himself in his blanket, he soon became, at least as regards the camp-fire and sociability, a nonentity. ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... about it is simply repairing the mechanical waste and renewing the chemical energy that will enable us to go on a little while and a little way farther); take out the time spent in sleep—in practical nonentity—and the remainder is a pitiful handful of years, so few, that to number them seems like a mathematical ...
— Christ, Christianity and the Bible • I. M. Haldeman
... courts those questions which concern the execution of its own laws. To this it is answered that the Union is in so singular a position that in relation to some matters it constitutes a people, and that in relation to all the rest it is a nonentity. But the inference to be drawn is, that in the laws relating to these matters the Union possesses all the rights of absolute sovereignty. The difficulty is to know what these matters are; and when once it is resolved (and we have shown how it was resolved, ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... business in the mornings, and Lady Norton, Lady Millicent, and Ormond, spent their time together: walking, driving in the sociable, or boating on the lake, they were continually together. Lady Norton, a very good kind of well-bred little woman, was a nonentity in conversation; but she never interrupted it, nor laid the slightest restraint on any one by her presence, which, indeed, was usually forgotten by Ormond. His conversation with Lady Millicent generally took a sentimental ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... The bunch is practicing on the field now. He wanted to pack me away into right garden, but I never was built to be a nonentity in the outfield." ...
— Rival Pitchers of Oakdale • Morgan Scott
... there are no such things in existence at all as thunderbolts of any sort. Like the snakes of Iceland, their whole history might, from the positive point of view at least, be summed up in the simple statement of their utter nonentity. But does that do away in the least, I should like to know, with their intrinsic interest and importance? Not a bit of it. It only adds to the mystery and charm of the whole subject. Does anyone feel as keenly interested in any real living ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... mountain, which seemed to stand strongly like the other rock mountains, gave suddenly, as the icebergs do, a loud-sounding crack; suddenly with huge clangor, shivered itself into ice-dust; and sank, carrying much along with it. In one day Scott's high-heaped money-wages became fairy-money and nonentity; in one day the rich man and lord of land saw himself penniless, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... livelier curiosity, than any other form of humanity there presented to my notice. He was, in truth, a rare phenomenon; so perfect, in one point of view; so shallow, so delusive, so impalpable, such an absolute nonentity, in every other. My conclusion was that he had no soul, no heart, no mind; nothing, as I have already said, but instincts: and yet, withal, so cunningly had the few materials of his character been put together, ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... a laugh. "If I were Fate, I'd just take you by the shoulders and shake you till you woke up. Then I'd go on shaking to keep you awake. You shouldn't be wasted on mere nonentity if I ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... too modest," retorted Grace. "Come on, little Miss Nonentity, let's go to bed or I won't get up early enough to-morrow morning to see Mabel Ashe before my ...
— Grace Harlowe's First Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... in polities, at least in so far as the career of Montagu was bound up with it. She began to try to persuade her husband to be, to some extent at least, ambitious. It may be that she was not happy at the thought of being married to a man who was regarded as a nonentity. She was always urging him to put his best foot forward. Sometimes she wrote to him as to a naughty child. "I am very much surprised that you do not tell me in your last letter that you have spoke to my Father," she said in August, 1714. ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... his head. "I hate being a notoriety," he said. "I like to pass through with the crowd. If I go away for a little while I shall return a nonentity." ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... House—five hundred turbulent broncos, each neighing for his own bin; the Senate—four score portentous clubmen, adjusting the conservative shirt-front of dignity and moderation over the license of privilege and "the interests"; the Executive—dillydallying between nonentity and the Big Stick; the Supreme Court—a handful of citizens and participators in our common human nature, magically transmuted into omniscient and omnipotent gods by certificates of appointment! And the rest of our hundred millions, in this ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... of interesting accomplishments, and, above all, in natural sweetness of disposition—a sweetness so marked that even under extreme provocation he never had been known to thrust out an angry paw. This is not to say that the Shah de Perse was a characterless cat, a lymphatic nonentity. On occasion—usually in connection with food that was distasteful to him—he could have his resentments; but they were manifested always with a dignified restraint. His nearest approach to ill-mannered abruptness was to bat with a contemptuous paw the offending morsel from his plate; which brusque ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... company's atmosphere: a hot smell of men, of sweat, of leather. He knew it very well. After a word with the lieutenant, he went a few paces higher, and sat there, a dominant figure, his sweat-marked horse swishing its tail, while he looked down on his men, on his orderly, a nonentity ...
— The Prussian Officer • D. H. Lawrence
... faithfully described by all historians of Greece, have been found to be part of the common mythical heritage of the Aryan nations. Achilleus and Helena, Oidipous and Iokasta, Oinone and Paris, have been discovered in India and again in Scandinavia, and so on, until their nonentity has become the legitimate inference from their very ubiquity. Legislators like Romulus and Numa, inventors like Kadmos, have evaporated into etymologies. Whole legions of heroes, dynasties of kings, and adulteresses as many as Dante saw borne on the whirlwind, have vanished ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... returned Roland; but, nevertheless, he applied himself to complete it. He was in the habit of discoursing upon private topics before Jenkins without any reserve, regarding him as a perfect nonentity. ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... gives but a gentle tap. The suddenness of the transition—no gentle fading out of half-remembered dreams, no slow lifting of lids, no pleasant uncertainty of time and place gradually replacing itself by dawning outlines of familiar chair and window frame and cornice—the leap from absolute nonentity into a glaring, staring world—for a moment almost unsettles Mr. Edgerton's reason. Then the fear for his sanity passes and a strange horror of approaching death takes its room. His pulse at the instant of waking throbs like a trip-hammer; an instant more and it intermits. ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... with whom I had become more or less reluctantly associated,—Catherine Harland and Dr. Brayle especially. Mr. Harland had, unconsciously to himself, been merely the link to bring the broken bits of a chain together—his secretary, Mr. Swinton, occupied the place of the always necessary nonentity in a group of intellectually or psychically connected beings,—and I was perfectly sure, without having any actual reason for my conviction, that if I remained much longer in Catherine Harland's company, her chance ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... Vance came up close—the watching eyes, the simulated interest, the feigned belief, the detective mental attitude, these broke through the grandiose panorama, bringing darkness. Vance, strong personality that hid behind assumed nonentity for some purpose of his own, intruded with sudden violence, demanding ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... embraces all that it sees, and pities all that it embraces. According as you turn inwards and penetrate more deeply into yourself, you will discover more and more your own emptiness, that you are not all that you are not, that you are not what you would wish to be, that you are, in a word, only a nonentity. And in touching your own nothingness, in not feeling your permanent base, in not reaching your own infinity, still less your own eternity, you will have a whole-hearted pity for yourself, and you will burn with a sorrowful love for yourself—a love that will consume your so-called self-love, ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... personage with, I think, livelier curiosity than any other form of humanity there presented to my notice. He was, in truth, a rare phenomenon; so perfect, in one point of view; so shallow, so delusive, so impalpable such an absolute nonentity, in every other. My conclusion was that he had no soul, no heart, no mind; nothing, as I have already said, but instincts; and yet, withal, so cunningly had the few materials of his character been put together ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... business type, with a sprinkling of other occupations not including physicians, sat fanning themselves into a perspiration in the Chamber of Commerce assembly rooms, and wondering what on earth an Emergency Health Meeting might be. Congressman Brett Harkins, a respectable nonentity, who was presiding, had refrained from telling them: deliberately, it would appear, as his speech had dealt vaguely with the greatness of Worthington's material prosperity, now threatened—if one might credit ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... whom the very thought disgusted the two friends was that jumping-jack of an Arthur Papillon. Universal suffrage, with its accustomed intelligence, had not failed to elect this nonentity and bombastic fool, and to-day he flounders about like a fish out of water in the midst of this political cesspool. Having been enriched by a large dowry, he has been by turns deputy, secretary, vice-president, president, head of committees, under secretary of State, in one word, everything that ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... himself about with rage, and grew paler and paler; he shook his fist. So the pair walked along a few steps. Gania did not stand on ceremony with the prince; he behaved just as though he were alone in his room. He clearly counted the latter as a nonentity. But suddenly he seemed to have ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... Oke, the same who had rebuilt Okehurst in its present shape. This Nicholas appears to have been somewhat different from the usual run of the family. He had, in his youth, sought adventures in America, and seems, generally speaking, to have been less of a nonentity than his ancestors. He married, when no longer very young, Alice, daughter of Virgil Pomfret, a beautiful young heiress from a neighbouring county. "It was the first time an Oke married a Pomfret," my host informed ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... you from becoming commonplace and obscure and—and everything you promised not to be when you married me," she retorted from the doorway, her eyes still alight with that disturbing and tantalizing fire. "It is my last desperate effort as a wife to save you from baldness, obesity, and nonentity." Wherewith she disappeared into her room and closed ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the Progress of Science sufficiently show that the study of geometry was almost a nonentity in England previously to the commencement of the eighteenth century. Before this period Dr. Dee, the celebrated author of the preliminary discourse to Billingsley's Euclid, had indeed resided at ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 34, June 22, 1850 • Various
... the globe, the elephant and the tortoise over again? Must not something end by supporting itself? Humanism is willing to let finite experience be self-supporting. Somewhere being must immediately breast nonentity. Why may not the advancing front of experience, carrying its immanent satisfactions and dissatisfactions, cut against the black inane as the luminous orb of the moon cuts the caerulean abyss? Why should anywhere the world be absolutely fixed and finished? And if reality genuinely ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... of personal character, or even of any moral quality, save (in Mrs. Wilding's case) that of patience under injury. Hazard 'The Gamester' is chosen as the hero, for what reason it is impossible to say; he is a mere nonentity, doing nothing which may distinguish him from any other gamester and blackguard, save that he is, as ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... affairs and Le Blanc over the war department. "I do not inquire into the theory of councils," said the able Dubois to the Regent by the mouth of his confidant Chavigny; "it was, as you know, the object of worship to the shallow pates of the old court. Humiliated by their nonentity at the end of the last reign, they begot this system upon the reveries of M. de Cambrai. But I think of you, I think of your interests. The king will reach, his majority, the grandees of the kingdom approach the monarque by virtue of their birth; if to this privilege they unite that of being ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... childbirth. So Moses was sent for, post-haste, to intercede with the Almighty. His piety, it was felt, would command attention. For an average of three hundred and sixty-two days a year Moses was a miserable worm, a nonentity, but on the other three, when death threatened to visit Malka or her little clan, Moses became a personage of prime importance, and was summoned at all hours of the day and night to wrestle with the angel Azrael. When the angel had retired, worsted, after a match sometimes ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... was I born. Thus awaking from the long night of what seemed, but was not, nonentity, at once into the very regions of fairy land—into a palace of imagination—into the wild dominions of monastic thought and erudition—it is not singular that I gazed around me with a startled and ardent eye—that I loitered ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... with doubt and hesitation, and even encountered the disapprobation of his court. A new power had arisen—that of opinion; which, though not recognised, was not the less influential, and whose decrees were beginning to assume sovereign authority. The nation, hitherto a nonentity, gradually asserted its rights, and without sharing power influenced it. Such is the course of all rising powers; they watch over it from without, before they are admitted into the government; then, from ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet
... things are. Until we see the background of darkness we cannot admire the light as a single and created thing. As soon as we have seen that darkness, all light is lightening, sudden, blinding, and divine. Until we picture nonentity we underrate the victory of God, and can realize none of the trophies of His ancient war. It is one of the million wild jests of truth that we know ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... It is reported that even his own followers are ignorant of it. Where we have come across his tracks, he has always played a secondary part. Somebody else assumes the chief role. But afterwards we always find that there has been some nonentity, a servant or a clerk, who has remained in the background unnoticed, and that the elusive Mr. Brown has escaped us ...
— The Secret Adversary • Agatha Christie
... lack of an answer. We do not wonder so strangely at an ingenious and well-set-up effect, for we feel such in ourselves; but a cause, reaching out beyond the verge [of fact] and dangling its legs in nonentity, with the hope of a rational foothold, should realize a strenuous life. Pluralism believes in truth and reason, but only as mystically realized, as lived in experience. Up from the breast of a man, up to his tongue and brain, ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... obtained the Canadas, its commerce consisted of a few peltries, conveyed to France by the vessels which brought out the troops and carried back the disbanded regiments. The lumber trade was unknown. The importations were a nonentity. While at present many hundreds of vessels are engaged in the direct timber trade, and more than one hundred and fifty vessels have been frequently counted on the river St Lawrence. These, it must be remembered, are almost exclusively owned by British merchants; while ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... Lord Hartledon, very quietly, "I have fancied several times lately that you are a little mistaking me. I am not to have a will of my own; I am to bend in all things to yours; you are to be mistress and master, I a nonentity: is it not so? This is a mistake. No woman ever had a better or more indulgent husband than you shall find in me: but in all necessary things, where it is needful and expedient that I should exercise my own judgment, and act as master, I shall ...
— Elster's Folly • Mrs. Henry Wood
... the strange house, provided only that he has chanced upon a fair sprinkling of his own set there. Who the master of the house may be he probably, if an average careless Gallio, knows little and cares less. Indeed, Paterfamilias is usually content to sink his own personality and be a nonentity for the nonce on the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... and kindest of men; his wife is—well, a nonentity, perhaps, but not a disagreeable one; and ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... to find one's instructions disregarded so flagrantly; but I reminded myself that, with the berthing of the ship in the basin, I should have accomplished all that had been demanded of me, and henceforth must expect to be treated as a nonentity. That, of course, would leave me quite free to think out some plan whereby to effect my escape and return to civilisation; for Wilde's Socialistic doctrines did not in the least appeal to me, and not even the prospect of passing ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... for a Barmecide feast of nonentity, with the possibility of a real banquet to be provided for us. But ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... evil insolence to do its worst, and leaving the place at an hour's notice, to sail away to protection, or, if she chose to remain in England, to surround herself with a bodyguard of the people in whose eyes his disrepute relegated a man such as Nigel Anstruthers to powerless nonentity. Alone, she could have smiled and turned her back upon him. But she was here to take care of Rosy. She occupied a position something like that of a woman who remains with a man and endures outrage because she cannot leave her ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... to prove the historical nonentity of Dr. Faustus was made at Wittenberg, in the year 1683. Some of his popular biographers had claimed for him a professorship at that celebrated university, or at least brought him into connection with it,—a pretension which the actual professors of that learned institution ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... up with an atrocious satisfaction. "He's nothing but a thief," she cried, "this father of yours. As to you I have never been deceived in you for a moment. I have been growing more and more sick of you for years. You are a vulgar, silly nonentity, and you shall go back to where you belong, whatever low place you have sprung from, and beg your bread—that is if anybody's charity will have anything to do with ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad |
