"Nothingness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... chimney I tried ran out on the face into nothingness, and I had to make a dangerous descent. The second was a deep gully, but so choked with rubble that after nearly braining myself I desisted. Still going eastwards, I found a sloping ledge which took me to a platform from which ran a crack ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... from the depths of his being. I repent me of the ignorance wherein I ever said that God made man out of nothing: there is no nothing out of which to make anything; God is all in all, and he made us out of himself. He who is parted from God has no original nothingness with which to take refuge. He is a live discord, an anti-truth. He is a death fighting against life, and doomed to endless vanity; an opposition to the very power by whose strength yet in him he opposes; a world of contradictions, ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... become? And thy sweet cords Still trembled at the touch of thy right hand, Unhappy bard of love. Alas, Italian song is still the child Of sorrow born. And yet, less hard to bear, Consuming grief than dull vacuity! O blessed thou, whose life was one lament! Disgust and nothingness are still our doom, And by our cradle sit, ...
— The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi • Giacomo Leopardi
... before God as much as to say, "I give up my way and will forever to be thine and thine alone; to love thee and serve thee; to do thy whole will now and forever." There must be humility before God; a deep inner consciousness of your nothingness and your inability to accomplish anything in life of yourself. "The meek he will guide in judgment." We must be meek and humble before the Lord and confess that we are dependent on him and that life will be an utter failure unless he wills and guides and plans and works ...
— How to Live a Holy Life • C. E. Orr
... nothingness as she disappeared into the kitchen. When she emerged again she was still enumerating the charms of the absurdly low-priced ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber
... Lawrence repeated. "It isn't the first night of my life I've struggled against a black so dense its nothingness seemed overpowering." ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades
... simply nothing, and nothingness does not excite or terrify one. I never felt better than I do ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... fairy-like in the picture one sees at night from the Green below. Dozens of lighted windows gleam softly through the foliage, for all the world like witches' lamps. The day reveals thin, blue plumes of smoke stealing out of the tops of the trees to be wafted off into nothingness; they come from invisible chimneys far down in the leafy fastnesses. Up here are the huts of the newly married. Almost without exception, they are tiny affairs, scarcely larger than the metaphorical bandbox. Each contains ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... Versailles, a royal residence, 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 ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... even as he spoke the strange illumination deepened, until it assumed the distinct and definite form of a lamp. Then the mantelpiece dissolved into nothingness, and Paul was staring through the chimney into a strange room, whose form and contents were dimly revealed by the curious lamp which occupied a table in the centre. Two persons sat at this table, the one a woman, the other a boy, and near at hand was an English army officer. The woman was small, ...
— The Ghost of Guir House • Charles Willing Beale
... ones! Bad definitions destroy themselves, for if they are thoroughly bad no one believes them, and if they contain those pleasing half truths which a generation loves to suckle upon, why then after their vogue they will wither into nothingness. Such definitions are of the letter, and die by it, but stiff, clumsy definitions kill the spirit. To define a great man by a rigid formula is to sink to the lowest practice of the worst class rooms. To define a tendency so sharply ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... Another vacuum of nothingness and he dreamed again, this time very vividly. Now his dream was that he had come to Egypt and was stretched on a bed in a room, through the windows of which he could see the Pyramids quite close at hand. More, he seemed to become acquainted with all their history. He saw them in the building; multitudes ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... in the 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 ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... take her, pays a dower! And he, poor fool, takes home the poison-flower; Laughs to hang jewels on the deadly thing He joys in; labours for her robe-wearing, Till wealth and peace are dead. He smarts the less In whose high seat is set a Nothingness, A woman naught availing. Worst of all The wise deep-thoughted! Never in my hall May she sit throned who thinks and waits and sighs! For Cypris breeds most evil in the wise, And least in her whose ...
— Hippolytus/The Bacchae • Euripides
... chaos reigned upon the east stand. All previous efforts paled into nothingness beside the outbursts of cheers that followed each other like claps of thunder up and down the long bank of fluttering color. Upon the other side of the field no rival shouts were heard. It was useless to try and drown that Niagara of sound. But ...
— The Half-Back • Ralph Henry Barbour
... corridor with Webber and Paula and he laughed as he walked. They had brought him back from nothingness without his consent, violating the privacy of death or near-death, and now something that he had just ...
— The Stars, My Brothers • Edmond Hamilton
... death in 1678, admits that she was "one of the greatest visionaries in the world on the chapter of death." She herself expressed her hypochondria otherwise: "I fear death more than other people do, because no one has ever formed so clear a conception of nothingness as I have." Ludicrous stories were told of her excessive fear of illness, and in her fits of alarm she found comfort from the ministrations of Antoine Singlin, who was the director of Pascal's conscience.[2] She became intimate with Arnauld d'Andilly, and with the rest of those Jansenist authors ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... His thoughts melted into nothingness, and when he awoke from his reverie he was thinking that Nora Glynn had come into his life like a fountain, shedding living water upon it, awakening it. And taking pleasure in the simile, he said, 'A fountain better than anything else expresses this natural ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... energies to such an end, of becoming the redeemer of his degraded country. But it is his weakness to be proud; he derives, from a comparison of his own extraordinary mind with the dwarfish intellects that surround him, an intense apprehension of the nothingness of human life. His passions and his powers are incomparably greater than those of other men; and instead of the latter having been employed in curbing the former, they have mutually lent each other strength;" but "in social life no human being can be more gentle, patient, and unassuming. ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... which the superb car was adorned, and which she, also, wore in her gown—yellow orchids, tenderly fashioned but very insistent and bright. Upon this patrician vision Mr. Heatherbloom had inadvertently looked, and the pathetic plaint regarding "Mother" died on the wings of nothingness. With unfilial respect he literally abandoned her and cast her to the winds. His eyes gleamed as they rested on the girl; he seemed to lose ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... there was silence. Sinan, Lord of Death, seemed to be lost in thought under the black shade of his canopy; the double line of dais stared at nothingness across the passage way; the giant guards stood still as statues; Masouda watched the brethren from beneath her long eye-lashes, while the brethren watched the sharp edge of the shadow of the canopy on the marble floor. They strove to seem unconcerned, but their hearts ...
— The Brethren • H. Rider Haggard
... Pasto. All the difficulties with which he had had to contend in the campaigns of Venezuela and Nueva Granada,—such as the flooded plains, the deep ravines between Venezuela and the Colombian valleys, the narrow and rugged passages, the wild beasts,—sink into nothingness as compared with the almost unconquerable obstacles which he was to face on his way to the South. In no other part of the continent do the Andes present such an appalling combination of ravines, torrents, precipitous ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... good at guessing," Mrs. Dean smiled tolerantly. The ways of schoolgirls were usually shrouded with a profound mystery, which disappeared into nothingness ...
— Marjorie Dean - High School Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... 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 kafila came from French territory ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... like an apparition passed and was not. But the imperishable spirit did not cease. It continued to exist, and, in its next incarnation, became the residing spirit of that apparitional body known as Darrell Standing's which soon is to be taken out and hanged and sent into the nothingness whither all ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... laugh, as if all the agitations of the past instants had been dissipated into nothingness by the jest of such a question. "I swear to you, Henri," she said, softly, "that the man I could love would not be at all like ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... 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 ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... to grow in my belly. Your troubadour is naturally an unhealthy man. I do not like the country except when travelling, because then the independence of my individuality causes me to rise above the knowledge of my nothingness. ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... takes I will give; All that He gives will I take; He, my only right! He, the one right before which all other rights fade into nothingness. I have full right to Him; Oh, may He have full ...
— Have We No Rights? - A frank discussion of the "rights" of missionaries • Mabel Williamson
... however basely the Rump might have acted in other respects, they acted very properly in this instance; for they declined to accept this treacherous offer, and poor Mister Cleary sunk into his original nothingness. ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... existence upon this earth leads them not to dread the last judgment. Athos, preserved, even in the eternal sleep, that placid and sincere smile—an ornament which was to accompany him to the tomb. The quietude of his features, the calm of his nothingness, made his servants for a long time doubt whether he had really quitted life. The comte's people wished to remove Grimaud, who from a distance devoured the face growing so pale, and did not approach, from the ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... also treasures of disappointed pleasure and of bitterness in this picture of 'The Lamentations of Earth to Heaven,'—dim symbol of human suffering. How does one, in the presence of this poem, feel filled with the spirit of St. Augustine, the nothingness of what we call joy, happiness, glory, here below,—delights of a moment, which at most only aid us to traverse in a dream this valley of tears! Certain pages of 'The City of God,' funeral prayers of Bossuet, can alone serve us for a comparison, in order to express the effect produced ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... done him made her faded charms at times almost 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 when ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... William talked of this—and to no one did he show the bitterness of his grief when he saw his vision fade into nothingness through Billy's unchanging refusal to live in his home. Only he himself knew the heartache, the loneliness, the almost unbearable longing of the past winter months while Billy had lived at Hillside; and only he himself knew now the almost overwhelming ...
— Miss Billy • Eleanor H. Porter
... brought his extremely bad French into the conversation. He thought, he said, that the guide was right to cut the rope: to deliver from existence those four unfortunate men, still young, condemned to live for many years longer; to send them, by a mere gesture, to peace, to nothingness,—what a noble and ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... of beauty is a joy forever; Its loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness; but will keep A bower quiet for us, and a sleep Full of sweet dreams and health and ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... all its elements profoundly impress us, less because of the curious standard they supply by which to gauge the intellectual level of that age than as the symbols chosen by the poet to express the identity and nothingness of all things living and inanimate. Before God, all creatures think, reason, speak, like man, because all are equal to him and he is but a breath. The stars, which are relatives of the Satan and of God's own children, wax enthusiastic and shout for joy; the lightning hearkens to the ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... it, for that would not have been prudent for a man of his age. He said that he had read it attentively for many years, and he had much of it at his tongue's end. He seemed deeply impressed with a sense of his own nothingness, and would repeatedly exclaim,— ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... if dooming it to destruction; sometimes with arms upraised, as if invoking ruin upon all the country; and sometimes stalking along with such tremendous strides as to make but one step from peak to peak; often dwarfing himself to nothingness, and again stretching up until his head is in the clouds, then disappearing entirely for a moment, only to ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... was certainly not for the dear Lord that she had swept; she would have her room swept out to-morrow or the day after, and garnished. Her hands began to swell again into huge pillows of nothingness. Then they shrank, and so did her head, to minute dots. It occurred to her that she was waiting for some event, some tremendously important event, to come to pass. She lay with shut eyes for a long time till her head and hands should return ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... again. I saw his gleaming eyes; I could have rushed through the air to meet him. But, alas! exaltation of feeling lasts only a moment; it drops us where it finds us. If it were not so, how easy to be a hero! The dull reaction of the present, like a slow avalanche, crushed and ground me into nothingness. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... emotion any woman could see. Oh, how white and cold and still the distant mountains shone in the pallid light! Oh, how silent, peaceful, deserted, the far-away slopes and ridges over the prairie! Oh, how faint and far and glimmering were the night lights of the stars, dimmed into nothingness by the broad, brilliant, overwhelming radiance of the Queen of Heaven! Oh, how sweet, luring, love-lighting were those witching waltz strains floating out upon the breathless air! Oh, how warm and close was the pressure of his strong arm as it held her hand upon his beating heart! Knowing—well ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... 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 ...
— The Lifted Bandage • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... She was gazing up at him with a strange expression of gladness, of relief, on her face. The long years of restraint and measured coldness seemed to have vanished, receded into nothingness. ...
— The Uttermost Farthing • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... For behold, if the knowledge of the goodness of God at this time has awakened you to a sense of your nothingness, and your ...
— The Book Of Mormon - An Account Written By The Hand Of Mormon Upon Plates Taken - From The Plates Of Nephi • Anonymous
... of the man continued its headlong course. It was running in a circle of many miles, impelled through the nothingness of night by the dark soul raging ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... in Trask's mouth. He was still tasting it when the colored turbulence died out of the screen and left the gray nothingness of hyperspace. Garvan Spasso—they had had no trouble in inducing him to come along—was staring avidly at the screen as though he could still see the ravished ...
— Space Viking • Henry Beam Piper
... The well padded suit encompassed him so gently there was no sense of pressure on his body to make up for the weightlessness. Johnny felt as though he were bodiless, a naked brain with eyes only hanging in nothingness. ...
— Far from Home • J.A. Taylor
... 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 ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... We recognise something in the Temple-children question which touches a wider issue than the personal or missionary. Those who have read Queen Victoria's Letters must have become conscious of a certain enlargement. Questions become great or dwindle into nothingness according as they affect the honour and the good of the Empire. We find ourselves instinctively "thinking Imperially," regarding things from the Throne side—from above instead of ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... 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 ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... Littering the waves with her own superscription Of bliss, till all her lambent beauty shakes towards us Spread out and known at last, and we are sure That beauty is a thing beyond the grave, That perfect, bright experience never falls To nothingness, and time will dim the moon Sooner than our full consummation here In this odd life will tarnish ...
— Look! We Have Come Through! • D. H. Lawrence
... glad accord, Obedient to the high behest, To worship with their fragrant breath Around the altars of the Lord; And some, from nothingness and death, Pass to the heaven ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... wholesome as a preparative, but it first reaches solution in the divinely holy and divinely courageous return to real life, as was exemplified by Luther. Man must at some time in his life recognize his nothingness. He must feel that he is nothing of himself, that his existence, his beginning, his everlasting life are rooted in the superearthly and incomprehensible. That is the returning to God which in reality is never ...
— Memories • Max Muller
... leaving behind them traces of their existence, memorials of their greatness. That a few 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 ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... fell upon Reuben and his supporter with a rhetoric whereof the moral flavour was positively astounding. Standing with the potato-bowl on one hip and a hand holding the knife on the other, she delivered her views as to David's laziness, temper, and general good-for-nothingness. If Reuben chose to incur the risks of throwing such a young lout into town-wickedness, with no one to look after him, let him; she'd be glad enough to be shut on him. But, as to writing to Mr. Gurney and that sort of talk, she wasn't going ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... sight, every mental faculty was instantly concentrated upon the single sense of hearing. My conductor had left me. There was the sound of a closing door and of padded foot-falls that trailed off into nothingness; then silence. ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... childless, and the last of his House, which had endured there about 300 years. Our clever Wilhelmina at Baireuth, though readers have forgotten the small circumstance, had married a superfluous Sister-in-law of hers to this Karl Edward; and, they say, it was some fond hope of progeny, suddenly dashed into nothingness, that finished the poor man, that night of May 25th. In any case, his Territory falls to Prussia, by Reich's Settlement of long standing (1683-1694); which had been confirmed anew to the late King, Friedrich Wilhelm:—we remember ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... of the spark of life divine, Be henceforth the Inverted Torch a sign That, though the flame beloved thou dost depress, Thou wilt not speed it into nothingness; But out of nether gloom wilt reinspire, And homeward lift the keen ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... "These are the chastenings of an all-wise and merciful Providence, sent for some inscrutable but just and beneficent purpose, it may be, to humble our pride, or to punish our unfaithfulness, or to impress us with the sense of our own nothingness and dependence on His mercy," when you are thus addressing your suffering fellow-subjects, and encouraging them to bear without repining the dispensations of Providence, may God grant that by your decision of this ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... leaped over them in serried ranks. They lay flat on the water and rushed toward the land. The storm whipped the white foam out of their mouths and drove it along the beach, where it hung gleaming on the bushes, and then vanished into nothingness. Right up to the shore they dashed, and then fell dead. But fresh hordes stormed shoreward from the offing, as though the land must be over-run by them; they reared, foaming, and struck at one another; they sprang, snorting and quivering, high in the ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... scents of the late spring, as the day grew toward evening and all nature seemed full of beauty and peace. It can easily be imagined what this drive meant, then, to a fine, sensitive young woman, whose every instinct of youth and freedom and life had been crushed into undeveloped nothingness by years of gray convention in an ...
— The Point of View • Elinor Glyn
... on the Canadian Pacific Railway, when, on awakening, I beheld directly opposite my window lovely Lake Louise and the beautiful glacier mirrored within the opalescent blue. This day in Japan ended with a glorious sunset, and, as the gold and azure melted away into nothingness, it was a fitful close to hours ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... snapped under the strain, the Girl collapsed. Limply she slid downward in her chair, one groping hand straying aimlessly to her forehead, then dropping of its own weight. "Quick, Jack,—I'm ill,—git me somethin'!" The voice trailed off to nothingness as the drooping ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... from a blow, with a shudder. It was the laugh of—a madman! I thought no more; I was resolved. I would fulfil the grim Law of Necessity to its letter. If Necessity caused my birth, it also demanded my death. Necessity could not force me to live against my will. Better eternal nothingness than madness. Slowly and deliberately I took from my vest a Milanese dagger of thin sharp steel—one that I always carried with me as a means of self-defence—I drew it from its sheath, and looked ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... the moment it seems unnatural and incredible that the living self with its special idiosyncrasies you have known so long can have left the body, still more unnatural that it should (as so many now believe) have utterly ceased to exist and become nothingness! ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... illusion. He abandoned himself to the half-belief that something of his father dwelt yet on earth—a ghostly voice, audible to the ear of his own flesh and blood. With what strange serenity, mingled with terrors, had that man considered the universal nothingness! He had plunged into it headlong, perhaps to render death, the answer that faced one at every inquiry, ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... finesse of the art, of which he was entirely ignorant. Besides, he began to find himself a mere novice in French gallantry, which is supported by an amazing volubility of tongue, and obsequious and incredible attention to trifles, a surprising faculty of laughing out of pure complaisance, and a nothingness of conversation which he could never attain. In short, our hero, who among his own countrymen would have passed for a sprightly, entertaining fellow, was considered in the brilliant assemblies of France as a youth of a very phlegmatic disposition. ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... and cleansed it of all the impurities with which it had been stained. Love was the torch which, while it fired my heart, enlightened all nature, heaven, and earth, and showed me to myself. I understood the nothingness of this world when I felt how it vanished before a single spark of true life. I loathed myself as I looked back into the past, and compared it with the purity and perfection of the one I loved. I entered into the heaven of my soul, as my heart and eyes ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... What if the universe were void, what if in the infinity of the exterior world there were nothing, across the splendid vision, but an insensate fatality? What if sacrifice itself were also a delusion? 'Dark days have come upon me, and nothingness seems the end of all, whereas all that is in my being had assured me of the plenitude of the universe.' And he asks himself the anxious question, 'Is it even sure that moral effort bears any fruit?' It is something ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... astronomers were absolutely cajoled, it appears, into believing that a decisive curvature had become apparent during the brief period of their astronomical history—during the mere point—during the utter nothingness of two or three thousand years! How incomprehensible, that considerations such as this did not at once indicate to them the true state of affairs—that of the binary revolution of our sun and Alpha Lyrae around ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... it, that gulf of nothingness, into which his soul had plunged so many times already? Down, down, to what unplumbed depths had it gone, those other times? True, it had come back. But it had brought no tidings of that dumb, black vast into which it had sunk. And thinner and thinner had grown the thread that ...
— The Fate of Felix Brand • Florence Finch Kelly
... blessings, domestic felicity. How it is possible for those who have once tasted this, the sweetest of all human delights, how it is possible for any rational mind afterwards to submit to be whirled round in the vortex of dissipation, to tolerate, to endure, the empty, vain, comfortless, nothingness of fashionable amusements, now appears to me to be almost inexplicable. The real felicity imparted and received in a happy domestic circle, in one evening, far, very far surpasses all the pleasures derived from the gaze and throng of ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... whole of them. Respectable in 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 ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... last words made me feel suddenly a sense of shame, Domini. It was as if a man said to another man, 'You are not a man.' Can you—can you understand the feeling I had just then? Something hot and bitter was in me. A sort of desperate sense of nothingness came over me, as if I were a skeleton sitting there with flesh and blood and trying to believe, and to make it believe, that I, too, was and had ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... through clear immensity, not at any 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 ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... the brightness of a comet, and that the fire in the temple was caused by a thunderbolt. But to these people, and more especially to Montezuma, whose mind was filled already with rumours of the coming of a strange white race, which, as it was truly prophesied, would bring his empire to nothingness, the omens seemed very evil. Indeed, if they had any doubt as to their meaning, it was soon to be dispelled, in their minds at least. For as we stood wonder-struck, a messenger, panting and soiled with travel, arrived among us and prostrating himself before the majesty of the emperor, he drew a painted ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard
... brotherly love, and repentance for sins committed above sacrifice and bodily mortification, and opened to his followers the prospect, after this weary life, no more to be exposed to the ever-recurring pains of new birth, but released from all suffering to return to Nirvana, or nothingness. While Brahminism drew a distinction between man and man, and with hierarchical pride took no thought of the Sudra or lower class of the people, and limited wisdom to the priestly caste, Sakya-muni preached ...
— A Comparative View of Religions • Johannes Henricus Scholten
... language attributed to the Buddha in the Udana[502]. "There is a state (ayatanam) where there is neither earth nor water, fire nor air, nor infinity either of space or of consciousness, nor nothingness, nor the absence of perception or non-perception[503], neither this world nor another, neither sun nor moon. That I call neither coming, going, nor standing, neither death nor birth. It is without stability, without ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... the forest, close to 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 moon, ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... will I come, Priscilla, if there be aught to see," continued she, throwing down the stocking which she was knitting for her father. "Truly my eyes ache with staring at nothingness." ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... that loftiest and deepest, For him the fetters of the heart break asunder, For him all doubts are solved, And his works become nothingness [Footnote ref 1]. ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... far as we can, let us carry clear thinking with us. Cruelty implies the infliction of pain: and there can be no pain without feeling. What cruelty, then, can be inflicted on the dead, if they have done with feeling? Or what on the living, if they live in a happy delusion and pass into nothingness without discovering the cheat? Let us hold most firmly that there has been no cheat; but let us also be reasonable and admit that, if cheat there be, it cannot also be cruel, since everything that would make it a ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... her, and had deceived her to gain her favors. Then she flushed with anger and swore to herself she hated him, and hoped never to see his face again. And the castle faded and was wafted away to the realms of airy nothingness. ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... controversies have ever closed. "Who now-a-days takes those Standard Rules, either one or the other, for their guide in writing?" This is the finest lesson ever offered to the furious heads of parties, and to all their men; let them meditate on the nothingness of their "Standard Rules," by the fate of ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... black body of her car seemed to sail out into nothingness like some weird aerial monster, the headlights streaming uncannily through space—then blackness—and ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... The billions of dollars that went up in the smoke of explosive nothingness would have been sufficient to have made a new world, one almost free from disease and completely free from poverty. Not an earth of fear, chaos, famine, pestilence, the DANSE MACABRE, but one broad land of peace, of prosperity, and ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... sun and shadow in the spaces of the air. Ishmael's keen eyes could see how a spider's thread, woven from one tall plant to another, and wavering ever so delicately in the faint breeze, was one moment lit here and there to a line of pure light that merged into nothingness and gleamed out again, while a moment later it might have vanished entirely or else shine its length. The midges, dancing in mid-air, were living sun-motes for one flash, then were swallowed up as suddenly as though they had ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... 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
... submissive to them. It would not have been well if they had been. The business of human creatures in this planet is not summed up in the most excellent of priestly catechisms. The world and its concerns continued to interest men, though priests insisted on their nothingness. They could not prevent kings from quarrelling with each other. They could not hinder disputed successions, and civil feuds, and wars, and political conspiracies. What they did do was to shelter the weak from the strong. In the eyes of the clergy, the serf and his lord stood on the ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... out of the cab, and took a lamp and moved forward into nothingness, and found a railing and some steps, and after climbing the steps saw a star, which proved ultimately to be a light over a swing-door. He pushed open the swing-door, and was confronted by ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... frightful weapons lashed out against the Nevian blocking the way, and under their impacts her screens flared brilliantly through the spectrum and went down. And in the instant of their failure the enemy vessel was literally blown into nothingness—no unprotected metal, however resistant, could exist for a moment in the pathway of those ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... burdensome night. The prince turned on his bed repeatedly, and asked himself whether he had not been blind, and if he had not received sight that day for the first time in order to convince himself of his folly and nothingness. How differently during those night hours did the warnings of his mother appear to him, and the restraint of his father in enouncing the supreme will, and even the stern ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... 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 quiet breathing. Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing A flowery band to bind us ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... The nothingness of kingly greatness and national pride were never before so finely contemned as by the voluptuous Assyrian, and were the scorn not mitigated by the skilful intermixture of mercifulness and philanthropy, the character would not be endurable. But when the same voice which ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... her lips form the words, guessed what it was she was saying. The crash on crash of thunder beat the sound of her voice to nothingness. The white glare of the lightning flashes blinded them. Coaley, quivering, his nostrils belling until they showed all red within, his big eyes staring, forged ahead, fighting ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... Thou from primeval nothingness didst call, First chaos, then existence. Lord! on Thee Eternity had its foundation; all Sprung forth from Thee:—of light, joy, harmony, Sole origin:—all life, all beauty Thine. Thy word created all, and doth create; Thy splendor fills all space with rays divine. Thou wert, and art, ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... as they descended their path; and the head was lost, the tail spread peacockwise, and evaporated slowly in that likeness; and soft to a breath of air as gossamer down, the body became a ball, a cock, a little lizard, nothingness. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... talks of kindness and 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, I have no ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... falling down to worship, said to them, "O dogs, why do ye not prostrate yourselves?" Replied Gharib, "Out on you, O ye accursed! Prostration befitteth not man save to the Worshipful King, who bringeth forth all creatures into beingness from nothingness and maketh water to well from the barren rockwell, Him who inclineth heart of sire unto new-born scion and who may not be described as sitting or standing; the God of Noah and Salih and Hud and Abraham the Friend, Who created Heaven and Hell and trees and fruit as ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... evils, and bring to pass all that is good; and next to make offerings to Earth and to the dead, and specially to thy husband King Darius, whom thou sawest in visions of the night, that he may send blessings from below to thy son, and turn away all trouble into darkness and nothingness." ...
— Stories from the Greek Tragedians • Alfred Church
... invaders reached the Krishna River the Hindus to their south, stricken with terror, combined, and gathered in haste to the new standard which alone seemed to offer some hope of protection. The decayed old states crumbled away into nothingness, and the fighting kings of Vijayanagar became the saviours of the south for two and a ...
— A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagar; A Contribution to the History of India • Robert Sewell
... striking on my left elbow. Strange to say, I was not in the least hurt, and again my heart wept tearful thanks to God, for, had the accident happened at any other part of the hill, I must have been dashed, a piece of shapeless nothingness, into ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... Because Fate holds no prize to crown success; 65 That all the oracles are dumb or cheat Because they have no secret to express; That none can pierce the vast black veil uncertain Because there is no light beyond the curtain; That all is vanity and nothingness. 70 ...
— The City of Dreadful Night • James Thomson
... life yawned for him like bleeding eye-sockets, and never for one moment could he get out of his mind the appalling nothingness of the stellar spaces. ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... this cold, dead fear before which he quailed! What was this 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 ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... though considerably dilapidated and weather-worn. The water flows through it, though the rock afforded standing room, beside the pillars. It was really like the archway of an enchanted palace, all of which has vanished except the entrance,—now only into nothingness and empty space. We climbed to the top of the arch, in which the traces of water having eddied are very perceptible. This curiosity occurs in a wild part of the river's course, and in ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... engrossment so characteristic of melancholy, he asks, what might have been thought the thing he needed least, "Make me to know mine end;" and then he dilates on the gloomy reflections which he had been cherishing in silence. Not only he himself, with his handbreadth of days, that shrink into absolute nothingness when brought into contrast with the life of God, but "every man," even when apparently "standing" most "firm, is only a breath." As a shadow every man moves spectral among shadows. The tumult that fills their lives is madness; "only for a breath are they disquieted." So bitterly, with an ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... Thou from primeval nothingness didst call First chaos, then existence—Lord! in Thee Eternity had its foundation; all Sprung forth from Thee—of light, joy, harmony, Sole Origin—all life, all beauty Thine; Thy word created all, and doth create; ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... stunning blow, Ned!), Mr. Smith has been so inconsiderate as to fall in 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 ...
— Oh, Money! Money! • Eleanor Hodgman Porter
... faculty, the privileged apprehension' by which 'the imaginative regeneration of the world' should be brought about, or even, at times, a brooding over 'what the soul passes, and must pass, through, aux abois with nothingness, or with those offended mysterious powers that may really ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... tower of St. Stephen's; while in the city below every form was prostrate in prayer. With his own hand he fired the nightly rocket, and watched its myriads of stars as they shot heavenward, illumined the darkness, and then fell back into nothingness. His heart beat painfully, as the last scintillations went out, and left but the pall of night behind. But he gazed on in silence, and in anguish unutterable. Suddenly he unclasped his rigid hands, for ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... which may be said to have only one surface—that of the water which is pushed back by the 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 turn ...
— Occult Chemistry - Clairvoyant Observations on the Chemical Elements • Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater
... dropped to nothingness, but her frightened eyes, travelling fearfully into the shadowy corners of the big bedroom, completed ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... death has entered and removed the best friend, Fate has done her worst; the plummet has sounded the depths of grief, and thereafter nothing can inspire terror. At one fell stroke all petty annoyances and corroding cares are sunk into nothingness. The memory of a great love lives enshrined in undying amber. It affords a ballast 'gainst all the storms that blow, and although it lends an unutterable sadness, it imparts an unspeakable peace. Where there is this haunting memory of a great love lost, there are always forgiveness, charity ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... who were intelligent enough to know just what was needed and just how to go about to secure it"—men not hampered by any pedagogical nonsense or grown stale over a long attempt to discriminate between the "infinity of nothingness and the nothingness of infinity" (as one might summarize a rather common criticism), rather than to the former years of patient toil, and discipline, and accomplishment which had really laid the foundation so well that all were able thus to respond. The common school, the high school, the college, ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... 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
... East have told us that man's deliverance from the evils of life must come through killing desire; we will reach Nirvana—rest—through nothingness. But within a decade it has been borne in upon a vast number of the thinking men of the world that deliverance from sorrow and discontent was to be had not through ceasing to ask questions, but by asking one question more. The question is this, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... the vision faded before his eyes into nothingness. He was alone once more in the darkness and the drenching rain; alone with a little gibing voice that seemed to come from within and yet was surely the voice of a devil jeering a devil's tattoo in time to his horse's hoof-beats, telling him he ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... stood before Pillbot, swaying slightly, but the upper body was unconditionally missing. From the large feet planted solidly on the floor, long legs rose majestically, terminating in slim, angular hips—and from thence vanished abruptly into nothingness. It was as though the upper body had been sheared away, neatly ...
— The 4-D Doodler • Graph Waldeyer
... As might be 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
... was play, Marguerite, confess it! You thought the wild Cuban girl was uttering empty breath of nothingness; you have had no real anxiety, you never dreamed that I should really find myself—where now I am. Where is it? Listen, Marguerite! My house—once Carlos's house, now mine by his brotherly gift—stands ...
— Rita • Laura E. Richards
... the remote nothingness there appeared a black speck growing larger and clearer, until with a whistle and a welcome clatter, amid the aching silence of ages, the 'material' train arrived, carrying its own water and 2,500 yards of ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... impress itself on our minds, he seized the piece of paper and dashed it into the jar of ammonia. When he withdrew it, it was just a plain sheet of white paper again. The red marks which the gas in the flask had brought out of nothingness had been effaced by the ammonia. They had ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds |
