"Nullity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... mere appearance is scarcely a presumption in favor of a conclusion in accordance with it. Science and experience are full of examples exposing the nullity or the falsity of appearances. The sun seems to move around the earth; but truth contradicts it. We seem to discern distances and the forms of bodies by direct sight; but the truth is we see nothing but shades and colors: all beyond is inference based on acquired experience. The first darkness would ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... Add to this our timidity in our intercourse with servants and teachers, our dread of the ever present devil, and the reader will see that, under such conditions, nothing but strong self-will and a good share of hope and mirthfulness could have saved an ordinary child from becoming a mere nullity. ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... beauties in the architecture of the church to her guests, not that these individuals were very much interested in such matters, for they were of that particular social type which considers that the highest form of good breeding is to show a polite nullity of feeling concerning everything and everybody. They were eminently 'cultured,' which nowadays means pre-eminently dull. Had they been asked, they would have said that it is dangerous to express any opinion on any subject,—even on the architecture of a church. Because the architect himself ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... murdering a slave, which some of the slave States do not only not forbid, but impliedly and practically admit[A]. The Professor should know, however, that all these statutes are, practically, a mere nullity. Nevertheless, they show the absoluteness of the power which they nominally qualify. This absoluteness is as distinctly implied by them, as the like was by the law of the Emperor Claudius, which imposed limitations upon the "jus vitae ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... of talking about anything save horses and bets; and the literary man cannot hope to escape the usual fate of those who narrow their horizon. When a man once settles down as "literary" and nothing else, he does not take long in reaching complete nullity. His power of emitting strings of grammatical sentences remains; but the sentences are only exudations from an awful blankness—he is written out. The rush after money has latterly brought some of our most exquisite writers of fiction ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... the rest, a solemn mockery—that there still is left to me the poor privilege of complaint. And I do complain. I complain that law and justice have been alike violated in my regard—I complain that the much belauded attribute 'British fair play' has been for me a nullity—I complain that the pleasant fiction described in the books as 'personal freedom' has had a most unpleasant illustration in my person—and I furthermore and particularly complain that by the design and contrivance ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... was, whether the withering influence of the overseers, the domination of the churchwardens, and the blighting despotism of the vestry-clerk, should be allowed to render the election of beadle a form—a nullity: whether they should impose a vestry-elected beadle on the parish, to do their bidding and forward their views, or whether the parishioners, fearlessly asserting their undoubted rights, should elect an independent beadle ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens |
