"Out of nothing" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... what great thing is it that thou, who art dust and nothingness, yieldest thyself to man for God's sake, when I, the Almighty and the Most High, who created all things out of nothing, subjected Myself to man for thy sake? I became the most humble and despised of men, that by My humility thou mightest overcome thy pride. Learn to obey, O dust! Learn to humble thyself, O earth and clay, and to bow thyself beneath the feet of all. Learn to crush thy passions, and to ...
— The Imitation of Christ • Thomas a Kempis
... what we do not know and cannot even imagine of Him, is far more wonderful than what we do and can. I mean One who is sovereign over His own will and actions, though always according to the eternal Rule of right and wrong, which is Himself. I mean, moreover, that He created all things out of nothing, and preserves them every moment, and could destroy them as easily as He made them; and that, in consequence, He is separated from them by an abyss, and is incommunicable in all His attributes. And further, ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... Allan Armadale with all that I have in me of a brother's love. I said to myself, 'If the thought of leaving him breaks my heart, the thought of leaving him is wrong!' That was some hours since, and I am in the same mind still. I can't believe—I won't believe—that a friendship which has grown out of nothing but kindness on one side, and nothing but gratitude on the other, is destined to lead to an evil end. Judge, you who are a clergyman, between the dead father, whose word is in these pages, and the living son, whose word is now on his lips! What is it appointed me to do, now that I am breathing the ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... Everything must have been created out of nothing. Look at that thick roll of hard flesh on your strong arm! That was not always there: you could not climb a tree when I first saw you. But you willed and tried and willed and tried; and your will created out of nothing the roll on your arm until you had your desire, and could ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... etc., 1887, II, 144), and there is also a version attributed to Dryden. page 260 13.—Lope Felix de Vega Carpio (1562-1635) was the most fertile playwright ever known to the world. Alone he created the Spanish drama almost out of nothing. Born at Madrid, where he spent most of his life, Lope was an infant prodigy who fulfilled the promise of his youth. His first play was written at the age of thirteen. He fought against the Portuguese in the expedition of 1583 and took part in the disastrous ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... was the success of the trio, that when, after a partnership of some thirteen or fourteen years, they separated, the division of fairly won spoil accruing to each was not less than L.30,000. Within the space of fourteen years say, industry had created out of nothing the incredible sum of L.90,000. During his travels, like Jemmy the sandman, for orders, Mr Cobden became initiated into the science of "spouting;" he became the oracle and orator of bars and travellers' rooms; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... "Made out of nothing. You see the absurdity, for nothing must have first existed. I am glad to see you laugh. Do you think that ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... were on the subscription paper. No one felt the inconvenience of this more than the clergyman's wife. She was a good manager, and had a wonderful faculty for making "one dollar go as far as three, and getting up meals out of nothing," as her husband often remarked. But it must be confessed, that with the keen appetites brought to them on the wings of the prairie winds, the little household sometimes rose from the ...
— The Cabin on the Prairie • C. H. (Charles Henry) Pearson
... cannot see it in its holy of holies and live. And it is, like God, increate, springing out of nothing, yet the maker of all things—ever changing yet the same yesterday, to-day ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... her talk of creation, as if creating things out of nothing was the commonest occurrence in the world. Glaudot stood up. "All ...
— A World Called Crimson • Darius John Granger
... supposing that the Lacedaemonians are a great nation because they bruise their ears; the far-fetched notion, which is 'really too bad,' that Simonides uses the Lesbian (?) word, (Greek), because he is addressing a Lesbian. The whole may also be considered as a satire on those who spin pompous theories out of nothing. As in the arguments of the Euthydemus and of the Cratylus, the veil of irony is never withdrawn; and we are left in doubt at last how far in this interpretation of Simonides Socrates is 'fooling,' how far ...
— Protagoras • Plato
... financial distress introduced the evil, sees a great portion of its revenues melt away before its eyes;(930) while in what concerns its outlay, nothing is more calculated to mislead it than such an imagined creation out of nothing. And a thing which greatly contributes to this its the frightful sensitiveness of a depreciated paper currency in the presence of complications of foreign politics, a quality which may cause the government as ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... when he is here; and if he looks at somebody else, she goes as black as a thunder-cloud. If he's half an hour late, she's quite sure he is visiting some other gentlewoman, whom he loves better than he loves her. She's for ever making little bits of misery out of nothing. If he were to call her 'honey-sweet Eva' to-day, and only 'sweet Eva' to-morrow, she would be positive there was some shocking reason for it, instead of, like a sensible girl, never thinking about it in that way ...
— Earl Hubert's Daughter - The Polishing of the Pearl - A Tale of the 13th Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... surprise than they felt, upon occasion. But if during her preparations she had given umbrage to one of the boys, her retreat was soon invaded with cries of—"Ah! I see you, making birthday presents out of nothing and a quarter of a yard of ribbon!" Or—"There you are! At it again, with two old visiting cards and a ha'porth of flannel!" And only Darling's tenderest kisses could appease Madam Liberality's wrath and ...
— A Great Emergency and Other Tales - A Great Emergency; A Very Ill-Tempered Family; Our Field; Madam Liberality • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... to get a higher form of a life from a lower one is in accordance with our observation and experience. It is therefore proper to be believed. The attempt to get it from that which has absolutely no life is like trying to get something out of nothing. The millionth part of a farthing put out to interest at ten per cent, will in five hundred years become over a million pounds, and so long as we have any millionth of a millionth of the farthing to start with, our getting as many million pounds as we have a fancy for ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... thought to answer to God the Father; or the world, in whom the Fathers of the Church seemed to recognize 'the firstborn of every creature.' Nor need we discuss at length how far Plato agrees in the later Jewish idea of creation, according to which God made the world out of nothing. For his original conception of matter as something which has no qualities is really a negation. Moreover in the Hebrew Scriptures the creation of the world is described, even more explicitly than in the Timaeus, not as a single act, but as a work or process which occupied ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... can say that man creates artistic products out of nothing. What is called creation is in reality a composition, a construction raised upon a primitive material of the mind, which must be collected from the environment by means of the senses. This is the ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... Pamela her heroine, she would have to supply from her own resources a large supplement of passion. Pamela was far too deficient in the commodity to be made anything of without such re-enforcement, even by an art more adept at making much out of nothing than Miss Liston's straightforward method ...
— Frivolous Cupid • Anthony Hope
... desire a man to change a piece of silver, he informs you wherein the Son differs from the Father; if you ask the price of a loaf, you are told in reply that the Son is inferior to the Father; if you inquire whether the bath is ready, the answer is that the Son was made out of nothing." The subtle questions pertaining to the Trinity were the theme of universal conversation, even amid the calamities of ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... pray, would be the fun if you had, and could? If at the cost of a postcard you could be fitted up as the Lady of the Lake in green draperies and water-lilies, it would no doubt be exceedingly becoming, but it would be no sport. No, young woman, you've got to contrive something out of nothing and an hour stolen from the night, and when you've done it you'll be in the mood to appreciate other people's contrivings into the bargain. Buck up! You're one of the dressy sort. ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... find something which we can grasp. The public generally have an idea that a detective can make something out of nothing that the merest film of a clew is all that is necessary with which to build up a strong substantial edifice of facts. It is only the Messieurs La Coqs and 'Old Sleuths' of books and illustrated weeklies that are possessed with the second ...
— Jim Cummings • Frank Pinkerton
... compact. But if perhaps they think, in other wise, Fires through their combinations can be quenched And change their substance, very well: behold, If fire shall spare to do so in no part, Then heat will perish utterly and all, And out of nothing would the world be formed. For change in anything from out its bounds Means instant death of that which was before; And thus a somewhat must persist unharmed Amid the world, lest all return to naught, And, born from naught, abundance thrive anew. Now since indeed there are those surest bodies ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... is all-powerful, he can give us all good without any evil, and if he is all-good it would logically follow that he will do so. Then, again, while affirming that man is a free agent, you at the same time claim that every effect must have a cause, or that something cannot come out of nothing. Now, the reconciliation of these two facts has ever defied the reason of mankind. And those that have adopted the belief in free will have confessed that reason did not lead them to that conclusion, but experience. On the other hand, the logical ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz
... be more readily recalled as the occasion of the sudden rise to eminence in their profession of Messrs. Crellan, Hunt & Crellan, solicitors for the plaintiff—a result due entirely to the wonderful ability shown in this case of building up, apparently out of nothing, a smashing weight of irresistible evidence. That the firm has since maintained—indeed enhanced—the position it then won for itself need scarcely be said here; its name is familiar to everybody. But there are not many of the outside ...
— Martin Hewitt, Investigator • Arthur Morrison
... be synonimous. We must, therefore, know both the cause and effect, and the relation between them. But do we pretend to be acquainted with the nature of the human soul and the nature of an idea, or the aptitude of the one to produce the other? This is a real creation; a production of something out of nothing: Which implies a power so great, that it may seem, at first sight, beyond the reach of any being, less than infinite. At least it must be owned, that such a power is not felt, nor known, nor even conceivable by the mind. We only feel the event, namely, the existence of an idea, consequent to a command ...
— An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding • David Hume et al
... we take this house or home as a test, we may very generally lay the simple spiritual foundations of the idea. God is that which can make something out of nothing. Man (it may truly be said) is that which can make something out of anything. In other words, while the joy of God be unlimited creation, the special joy of man is limited creation, the combination of creation with limits. Man's pleasure, therefore, ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... as men, can find or make a party question, and quarrel out of any thing or out of nothing. There was a Scotch pedlar, who used to come every Thursday evening to our school to supply our various wants and fancies. The Scotch pedlar died, and two candidates offered to supply his place, an English lad of the name ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... of the statement contained in the first chapter of Genesis—the only account of Creation which is fitted to solve all difficulties and to meet all objections. "Maker" in this article is used in the sense of Creator, implying that heaven and earth were called into existence out of nothing by the word of Divine power; and by "heaven and earth" are meant all creatures, visible and invisible, that have ...
— Exposition of the Apostles Creed • James Dodds
... such speculations.[244] His mind was utterly unscientific; but as a religious philosopher he found it necessary to give a theory of the creation. Jewish dogma held that the world had been called into being out of nothing; the Greek philosophers repudiated such an idea, and held that creation must be the result of a reasonable process; Aristotle had imagined that matter was a separately existent principle with mind, and that the world was eternal; ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... these sudden changes. People who are of good stock and are properly brought up are only too glad to stay as they were, or even to become more humble, when they rise to higher distinction. But those who grow up quickly out of nothing, like mushrooms, seem to come naturally by ...
— Comedies • Ludvig Holberg
... infinite zest to one of Glynn's outrageous flights. Glynn had not read much in his short life, and his memory was nothing to boast of, but his imagination was quite gigantic. He could invent almost anything; and the curious part of it was, that he could do it out of nothing, if need be. He never took time to consider what he should say. When called on for a story he began at once, and it flowed from him like a flood of sparkling water from a fountain in fairy realms. Up in the clouds; high in the blue ether; down ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne
... into ecstasies over this irreverent trifling, Delsarte did not disdain to caricature it, and gave us a most comical little performance. Here again we see how he could transform everything, and make something out of nothing! ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... Apprehension of a future Reckoning, and at last leaving not only his own Children, but possibly those of other People, by his Means, in starving Circumstances; while a Fellow, whom one would scarce suspect to have a humane Soul, shall perhaps raise a vast Estate out of Nothing, and be the Founder of a Family capable of being very considerable in their Country, and doing many illustrious Services to it. That this Observation is just, Experience has put beyond all Dispute. But though ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... make a football team out of eleven clothing store dummies! Sometimes I think that Boots ought to be head coach instead of Robey. I've got nothing against Robey, either. He's a bit of a 'miracle man' himself, but for building a team out of nothing Boutelle has him both shoulders to ...
— Left Guard Gilbert • Ralph Henry Barbour
... I don't know what you mean, Cyprian, by poetry without rhyme or verse, any more than I should if you talked about pictures that were painted on nothing, or statues that were made out of nothing. How can you tell that anything is poetry, I should like to know, if there is neither a regular line with just so many syllables, nor a rhyme? Of course you can't. I never have any thoughts too beautiful to put in verse: nothing can be ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... "Stag and Hounds" he congratulated himself that the earlier woman still subsisted in the later, there could be no doubt of that, and in sufficient proportion for her to create a new life, and out of nothing but her own wits, for if she had escaped from the convent with her intelligence, or part of it, she hadn't escaped with her money; the nuns had got her money safe enough. She would be loth to admit it, but it could not be otherwise. ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... were fashioned; how this spark of vital flame was breathed into the lifeless lump or atom? Wonder-working Lord, thou only knowest. Wonderful are all the works of creation; but Oh, what are they to thy work of redemption? To bring worlds out of nothing, to bring light out of darkness, was thy easy work; but to bring good out of evil, this, this was the wonder. Thousands and ten thousands of worlds were, and may yet be created without cost. God says, Let it be, and it is; but redemption! O, who can tell the cost? Blessed ...
— The Power of Faith - Exemplified In The Life And Writings Of The Late Mrs. Isabella Graham. • Isabella Graham
... Matter or corporeal substance to have been the main pillar and support of Scepticism, so likewise upon the same foundation have been raised all the impious schemes of Atheism and Irreligion. Nay, so great a difficulty has it been thought to conceive Matter produced out of nothing, that the most celebrated among the ancient philosophers, even of those who maintained the being of a God, have thought Matter to be uncreated and co-eternal with Him. How great a friend material ...
— A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge • George Berkeley
... had towers to be built and apparatus transplanted, the supply of oil must be maintained and the men fed, in the same inaccessible and distant scenes, a whole service with its routine ... had to be called out of nothing; and a new trade (that of light-keeper) to be ...
— The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls • Jacqueline M. Overton
... heightening of what is already fine, and obviously fine in itself. And this particular quality of interpretation has its value too as criticism. For, while it gives the utmost value to what is implicitly there, there at least in embryo, it cannot create out of nothing; it cannot make insincere work sincere, or fill empty work with meaning which never could have belonged to it. Brahms, at his moments of least vitality, comes into a new vigour of life; but Strauss, played by these sincere, precise, thoughtful musicians ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... day and get no nearer; the gorgeous momentary blaze of sunset colours in the west; the rustle of the wind through the short twilight when the west is a pure pale green and the east the darkest blue; and the downward swoop of the planets out of nothing to the earth. The inheritor of the other places dreamed himself back into his inheritance as he tramped to and fro, forgetful of his blindness and parched with desire as with a fever—until unexpectedly he heard the blackbirds and the swallows bustling and piping in the garden, and knew that ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... the Fairy, "he wouldn't be very likely to bring the body out to lunch with him. You shouldn't be so uncharitable, my child. And, as for birds, I should have thought you knew what busy-bodies they are, and what scandals they make out of nothing at all." ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... worked incredibly hard. Wait till you see your name surrounded by the phrases I will devise you. I can make men out of nothing." His eyes shone into mine. "I once heard a man say that the trail of the serpent lay across my papers. That man is in an asylum now. I can break men, too, you see. Now I ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne
... will make something out of nothing, who will make money out of this blank paper, who will wheedle the Creole traders into believing they are doing us a favor and making their everlasting fortune by advancing ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... cannot find any consensus among Biblical scholars as to the meaning of the words, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." Some say that the Hebrew word bara, which is translated "create," means "made out of nothing." I venture to object to that rendering, not on the ground of scholarship, but of common sense. Omnipotence itself can surely no more make something "out of" nothing than it can make a triangular circle. What is intended by "made ...
— Mr. Gladstone and Genesis - Essay #5 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... go. He climbed aboard the stranded craft—a forlorn picture she made, lying on her side in the mud—and was surprised to find how much had been manufactured "out of nothing." Her seams, those which the sun had opened, were caulked neatly; her deck was clean and white; she was partially rigged, with new and old canvas and ropes; and to his landsman's eyes she looked almost fit for sea. But when he said as much to Seth, ...
— The Woman-Haters • Joseph C. Lincoln
... are thus the two elements which enter into the one Absolute Idea as contradictories, and both together combine to form a complete notion of bare production, or the becoming of something out of nothing,—the unfolding of real existence in its lowest ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... moulding the future as we go, we find ourselves moving. In the unfathomable depths of the past we are aware of a form, a shape, a principle, a premonition; and into the unfathomable depths of the future we project the fulfilled reality of this. We are as gods creating something out of nothing. But when we have created it . . . behold! it was there from the beginning; and the nothing out of which we have created it has receded into a second future from which it mocks and ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... upon the fancy, by heightening every danger; representing the English and Dutch captains to be men incapable of hearing reason, or of distinguishing between honest men and rogues; or between a story calculated for our own turn, made out of nothing, on purpose to deceive, and a true, genuine account of our whole voyage, progress, and design; for we might many ways have convinced any reasonable creatures that we were not pirates; the goods we had on board, ...
— The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... least sentimental, her natural disposition inclining her to be more than cheerful, actually gay. She soon recovered herself, and when, a short time after, she stood, scissors in hand, demonstrating how very easy it was to make something out of nothing, her sisters never suspected how very near tears had lately been to those bright eyes, which were always ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... hold of him, when the chap hadn't a halfpenny to fly with, but was a most ordacious fellow at speculating and inventions, and was always up to something new. One day he had a plan for making moist sugar out of bricks—then soap out of nothing—and sweet oil out of stones. At last Clayton hears of him, and hooks him up, gets him to the chapel; first converts him, and then goes partners with him in the spekylations—let's him have as much money as he asks for, and because soap doesn't ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... nothing like sich an edication. It does everything for a man, and he larns to make everything out of nothing. I could make my bread where these same Indians wouldn't find the skin of a hoe-cake; and in these woods, or in the middle of the sea, t'ant anything for me to say I can always fish up some notion that ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... to be 'acquainted with the slightest occasional characteristics of so eminent a man.' Certainly, there is nothing ridiculous in the fact of a man making a will. But this is the measure of Johnson's achievement. He had created gloriously much out of nothing at all. There he sat, old and ailing and unencouraged by the company, but soaring higher and higher in absurdity, more and more rejoicing, and still soaring and rejoicing after he had gone out into the night ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... of a masterpiece of a weather vane made by one of his fellow workers which included a Greek column, a sheaf of wheat, a basket of fruit, and a flag, all beautifully worked out of nothing but strips of zinc ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... handiwork reflectively. "Well, it does make you feel that you've accomplished a great deal when you've created something out of nothing." ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake
... exceedingly fine, the threads being no coarser, indeed in many cases less so, than the fine linen it adorns. This is known as Reticella, or "punto in aria." The last name is applicable to all the laces of Venice which succeeded Reticella, and means lace literally made out of nothing or ...
— Chats on Old Lace and Needlework • Emily Leigh Lowes
... comparison holds in a certain respect: because, to wit, as God moves the world, so the soul moves the body. But it does not hold in every respect: for the soul did not create the body out of nothing, as God created the world; for which reason the world is wholly subject ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... disturbing. It is true that she had not exhibited it in any other way before—quite to the contrary—but nevertheless he saw strong evidences of it now, and it made him very bitter in his feeling toward her. How could she be guilty of any such conduct toward him? Had he not picked her up out of nothing, so to ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... slain by the Cainite hypocrites. It is always the divine rule that the cross and affliction should precede consolation. God never comforts any but the afflicted, just as he never quickens unto life any but the dead, nor ever justifies any but sinners! He always creates all things out of nothing. ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... 'assumed that a force which is able to overcome powerful resistance, as for instance that of the conductors, good or bad, through which the current passes, and that again of the electrolytic action where bodies are decomposed by it, can arise out of nothing; that, without any change in the acting matter, or the consumption of any generating force, a current shall be produced which shall go on for ever against a constant resistance, or only be stopped, as in the voltaic trough, by the ruins which ...
— Faraday As A Discoverer • John Tyndall
... el-Gumma (pilgrimage of the Friday) is seven times blessed, or even equivalent to making it seven times in ordinary years. As any beggar in the street could tell a man this, it may give you some notion of how absurdly people make theories out of nothing for want of a ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... alone: they were their own prisoners, secure from the street and from all interruption. Hilda, once more and in a higher degree, realized the miraculous human power to make experience out of nothing. They had nothing but themselves, and they could, if they chose, create all their future ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... in his person traces of the battle he had fought. There were those who called him lucky; but these had lain softly and fared well while he starved and wrought, winning his way by inches until he built up out of nothing the splendid trade ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... according to my notion, is against it, since general laws seem sufficient for that end.... The light of Nature affords us not a single argument for a future state: this is the only one, that it is possible with God, since He who made us out of nothing can surely re-create us; and that He will do this we humbly hope." He published an ode against atheism, with which he has strangely enough often been ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... wife, child, everything, to me. 'Tis like some work of vanity,—a carved image that a man may give his whole life to making, and yet die content if he achieves but some approach to the creation of his soul. I have made this estate out of nothing; it hath grown larger and larger, richer and more rich, in answer to my skill; why should I not love it, and put my whole heart in the accomplishment of my design, with the same devotion that you admire in the maker of ...
— A Set of Rogues • Frank Barrett
... gray paper most accurately cut but without the slightest attempt at a frame. This is all: not a seat, not a cushion, not a scrap of furniture. It is the very acme of studied simplicity, of elegance made out of nothing, of the most immaculate and incredible cleanliness. And while following the bonzes through this long suite of empty halls, we are struck by their contrast with the overflow of knickknacks scattered about our rooms in France, and we take a sudden dislike to the profusion and ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... coincidences combined, coming out of nothing as it were, advancing like spirits summoned on to the stage, all to effect this end! Think of the American Colonies; with one little exception they were perhaps the most completely non-Catholic ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... supper was a marvel of culinary art, I assure you, even if it was a fraud in one or two things, We were complimented quite graciously by some of the older housekeepers, who pride themselves upon knowing how to make more delicious little dishes out of nothing than anyone else. But this time it was North and South combined, for you will remember that Mrs. Barker ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... except in strict co-ordination with the forces and qualities of material things. The idea in his consciousness is powerless save in so far as it is a guide to combinations and modifications which are latent in reality. The man who works with his hands does not create out of nothing a new totality. Even genius is conditioned by the elements he works with and upon. He can do nothing with his materials beyond what it is in themselves to yield. This sense of co-operation is strongly marked in the higher grades of activity. ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... which interested him most closely, Milton knew that his understanding of the text differed from the standard of Protestant orthodoxy. That God created matter, not out of nothing, but out of Himself, and that death is, in the course of nature, total extinction of being, though not opinions received, were not singular. More startling, to European modes of thinking, is his assertion that polygamy is not, in itself, contrary to morality, though it may ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... to be inferred) about it, to warrant our writing "First Cause" with capitals, then the proposition would pass on all hands without serious question. But directly we are brought face to face, not merely with the isolated idea of creation of tangible forms out of nothing (as the phrase is), but rather with the whole history and development of the world and its inhabitants, we see so many conflicting elements, such a power of natural forces and human passions warring against the progress of good, and seeming ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... assistant chef at the Hotel Metropole in Brussels. We decided that he ought to be kept in a warm, moist atmosphere for a long time, and he was installed in the kitchen. He was a genius at making miracles out of nothing, and his soups made out of bacon rind and old bones, followed by entrees constructed from bully beef, were a dream. He was assisted by the nuns from Louvain who had accompanied us to Poperinghe, ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar
... Platonic or Aristotelian, is imperishable (cf. Tim. 52 A. [Greek: phthoran ou prosdechomenon]). Non in nihilum: this is aimed at the Atomists, who maintained that infinite subdivision logically led to the passing of things into nothing and their reparation out of nothing again. See Lucr. I. 215—264, and elsewhere. Infinite secari: through the authority of Aristotle, the doctrine of the infinite subdivisibility of matter had become so thoroughly the orthodox one that the Atom was scouted as a silly ...
— Academica • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... sure, but something! I should have liked a carrot or two, but in these hard times that would have been extravagant. And, after all, there is some credit in making good soup out of nothing at all. If one could run here and there in the market—'A pound of your best veal, monsieur'—'A bunch of those fine turnips, and a stick of celery, madame'—well, truth obliges me to admit that it is possible the soup would have a finer flavour, but there would not be the satisfaction of seeing ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various
... am;" I, who give all things a being, will give a being to my promise. I will make Pharaoh hearken, and the people obey. Well then, what is it that this name of God will not answer? It is a creating name,—a name that can bring all things out of nothing by a word. If he be such as he is, then he can make of us what he pleases. If our souls had this name constantly engraven on our hearts, O what power would divine promises and threatenings have with us! "I, even I, am he that comforteth thee," saith he, Isaiah xli. 12. If we believed ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... contest. Another farmer maintains that his ice-crop is the winner. But electricity generated from falling water of a brook meandering across one's acres, comes nearer to the correct answer of how to make something out of nothing. It merely utilizes the wasted energy of water rolling down hill—the weight of water, the pulling power of gravity. Water is still water, after it has run through a turbine wheel to turn an electric generator. It is still wet; it is there for watering the stock; ...
— Electricity for the farm - Light, heat and power by inexpensive methods from the water - wheel or farm engine • Frederick Irving Anderson
... I am a spirit formed of flaming light; I saw the monstrous worlds arise out of nothing: thou art of dust, and of yesterday. ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... short of physical impossibilities, must, for the welfare of my soul, alter my will. . . . I find something very satisfactory in the thought that man has the power of framing such props and weapons out of the most trivial materials, indeed out of nothing, merely by the force of his will, which thereby truly deserves the ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... things emanate from it, and must be within its nature. For what is in the manifested must be in the manifestor—no stream can rise higher than its source—the effect cannot be greater than the cause—you cannot get something out of nothing. ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... whatsoever he would out of nothing, is it a hard Matter for him to restore to its former Nature that which hath been changed in its Form? I don't dispute anxiously which Way it can be done; it is sufficient to me, that he who hath promised that it shall be so, is so true, that he ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... and acknowledge hence the truth. The Psalmist speaks of us all as fellows or partakers of the Lord, but were he one of things which come out of nothing and of things generated he himself had been one of those who partake. But since he hymned him as the eternal God, saying, "Thy throne, O God, is forever and ever," and has declared that all other things partake of him, what conclusion must we draw, but that he is distinct from generated ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... these cases, is apt to be nothing but recollection in disguise, the shaking of a kaleidoscope formed of fragmentary reminiscences. I remember once, in some momentary access of ambition, trying to invent a play. I occupied several hours of a long country walk in, as I believed, creating out of nothing at all a dramatic story. When at last I had modelled it into some sort of coherency, I stepped back from it in my mind, as it were, and contemplated it as a whole. No sooner had I done so than it began to seem vaguely familiar. "Where have I seen this ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... consequence follow that it is impossible to believe it to be. For we are bound in reason to be assured of many things of which we can form no conception. Reason compels us to be assured of the reality of space, of eternity, of the creation of the universe out of nothing, and, perhaps we may add, of the being of GOD; the being of GOD, I mean, considered apart from His nature and attributes. Yet we cannot form any intelligent conception of these realities. We cannot shape to our apprehension the faintest rational conception of the ...
— The Life of the Waiting Soul - in the Intermediate State • R. E. Sanderson
... her homely suit and unstudied contour—painfully unstudied to fastidious eyes—from Ethelberta's well-arranged draperies, even from Picotee's clever bits of ribbon, by which she made herself look pretty out of nothing at all. Yet this negligence was his sister's essence; without it she would have been a spoilt product. She had no outer world, and her rusty black was as appropriate to Faith's unseen courses as were Ethelberta's correct lights and shades to ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... unpleasant humour for having it perpetually by one. And though I easily believe that to marry one for whom we have already some affection will infinitely increase that kindness, yet I shall never be persuaded that marriage has a charm to raise love out of nothing, much less out ...
— The Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54 • Edward Abbott Parry
... call; a pretty little woman, as friendly and kind as her husband. Then Clover and Phil went out for a stroll about the town. Their wonder increased at every turn; that a place so well equipped and complete in its appointments could have been created out of nothing in ...
— Clover • Susan Coolidge
... discussed that which we know as things: it remains that I should speak of that which we know as truths. For example, when we think that it is impossible to make anything out of nothing, we do not imagine that this proposition is a thing which exists, or a property of something, but we take it for a certain eternal truth, which has its seat in the mind (pensee), and is called a common notion or an axiom. ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... born. Worlds wax and wane, suns crumble into dust, But matter pregnant with immortal life, Since erst the white-haired centuries wheeled the vast, Hath lost nor gained. Who made it, and who made The Maker? Out of nothing, nothing. Lo The worm that crawls from out the sun-touched sand, What knows he of the huge, round, rolling Earth? Yet more than thou of all the vast Beyond, Or ever wilt. Content thee; let it be: Know only this—there is a Power unknown— ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... major-general was a difficult one. To knit into an army such a mass of units, to create supplies out of nothing, to organize a commissary and means of communication, and maintain a firm front over a line of ten miles, these were the needs of the situation. We need scarcely marvel that Ward, old and enfeebled, with his hands tied by uncertain authority, could not ...
— The Siege of Boston • Allen French
... rush for any landscape that did not express the time of day, the climate, the period of the world it was meant to illustrate, or had not this character of wholeness in it. His eye also does justice to Rembrandt's fine and masterly effects. In the way in which that artist works something out of nothing, and transforms the stump of a tree, a common figure into an ideal object, by the gorgeous light and shade thrown upon it, he perceives an analogy to his own mode of investing the minute details of nature with an atmosphere ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... "the uncreative instinct," that safeguard and concomitant of a civilisation which demands of us complete efficiency, practical and thorough employment of every second of our time and every inch of our space? We know, of course, that out of nothing nothing can be made, that to "create" anything a man must first receive impressions, and that to receive impressions requires an apparatus of nerves and feelers, exposed and quivering to every vibration round it, an apparatus so entirely opposed to our national spirit and traditions ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Chronicle promised to take any articles that I might send them from the front, but I haven't written any. You cannot write articles for The Daily Chronicle out of nothing; ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... "They did not tell me—in fact I was not prepared—May I ask you not to mention my mistake to the girls? Constance, as you doubtless have discovered, is very silly, given to making great capital out of nothing. We ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... instantly accepted. The Gipsies placed themselves in the circular form, and both being in the middle, commenced with their conjuring powers to the best advantage. At last the narrator proposed the making of something out of nothing. This proposal was accepted. A stone which never existed, was to be created, and appear in a certain form in the middle of a circle made on the turf. The master of the gang commenced, and after much stamping with his foot, and the narrator warmly exhorting him to cry aloud; like ...
— The Gipsies' Advocate - or, Observations on the Origin, Character, Manners, and Habits of - The English Gipsies • James Crabb
... one of the "Fallacies of Hope"—for it is quite hopeless to make out, the sun smoking his cigar of colour, and exhaling earth's humid bubbles; yet we do see a great number of "bubble" heads, scratchy things, in red wigs, rolling and floating out of nothing into nothing. There must indeed have been very wondrous giants in those days; for here is an enormous leg, far beyond the "ex pede Herculem," rising up some leagues off far bigger than whole figures close at hand. But we learn the wonderful fact, that the morning ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... thanking you, I am only feeling a growing admiration for you—it makes me happy to look at you. I dare say I am speaking very foolishly, but I must speak—I must explain, if it be out of nothing better than self-respect." ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... wishing we had got the Camel here, though he would be no good without the galley and his tools. Not a bad chap to have, though, Mr Poole, if we was to land in a sort of Robinson Crusoe island. There's worse messmates at a time like that than a chap as can knock up decent wittles out of nothing; make a good pot of soup out of a flannel-shirt and an old shoe, and roast meat out of them knobs and things like cork-blocks as you find growing on trees. Some of them cookie chaps too, like the Camel, are precious keen about the nose, long-headed and knowing. ...
— Fitz the Filibuster • George Manville Fenn
... him, he rises up grand and mysterious as a pyramid, the other is as insignificant as life. Look at the Jew's face, it is done with one tint; a synthesis, a dark red, and the face is as it were made out of nothing—hardly anything, and yet everything is said... You can't say where the picture begins or ends, the Jew surges out of the darkness like a vision. Look at his robe, a few folds, that is all, and yet he's completely dressed, and his hand, how large, how great... Don't ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... inert matter, which world, in that case, could be nothing else but inert and lifeless, like implements fashioned by human hands and not an eternal process of self-development, or who think they can imagine the going forth of a material something out of nothing, know neither the world nor him. If matter only is something, then there is nowhere anything, and nowhere, in all eternity, can anything be. Only Reason is: the infinite reason in itself, and the finite in and through the infinite. ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... of able-bodied men accustomed to healthy exercise into a serviceable and even a victorious army, but we made a great mistake. The commissariat and sanitary service and especially the military train-corps would have to be created out of nothing. When in June the governor of one State reported that his infantry regiment was formed and only waiting for rifles, uniforms and the necessary military wagons, and when another declared that his two regiments of cavalry and six batteries ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
... the Sabbath is essential to the faith; for such only as observe the Sabbath confess that the earth will be renewed: because He who created it out of nothing will renew it."—David Kimchi, on Isa. 55:5, ...
— A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse • Sylvester Bliss
... instant, with uplifted hand, To watch, between black ruined portals of cloud, One star,—the tottering portals fall and crush it. Here are a thousand books! here is the wisdom Alembicked out of dust, or out of nothing; Choose now the weightiest word, most golden page, Most somberly musicked line; hold up these lanterns,— These paltry lanterns, wisdoms, philosophies,— Above your eyes, against this wall of darkness; ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... angry, as well he might be, after the things he'd heard, but he was entirely cold and collected. Gordon was hot, and bursting with imaginary wrongs. I was aghast at this perfectly foolish and unnecessary muddle that had suddenly arisen out of nothing. Sandy apologized to me with unimpeachable politeness for inadvertently overhearing, and then turned to Gordon and stiffly invited him to get into his car ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster
... is neither more cunning nor more powerful than the pen of a well bred author. It creates something out of nothing, (more frequently nothing out of something), changes time, place, and human nature; it lifts up the blue roofing of ocean, and gives you a glimpse of fish-life; and deeper still, shows you the coral forests of the Naiads, and their aquatic palaces. It draws back the ...
— Daisy's Necklace - And What Came of It • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... she loved, everything was a burden. Even her religion, though she clung to it with an ever-increasing tenacity, failed at this period to bring her much comfort. Every night it seemed to her that the day had been one long and dreary struggle to make something out of nothing; and in the morning the night, too, seemed to have been alive with conflict—All Thy waves and Thy storms have ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... torture of "gas," the use of flame jets, and a new exacerbation of the savagery of the actual fighting. For a time it seemed as though the taking of prisoners along the western front would cease. Tales of torture and mutilation, tales of the kind that arise nowhere and out of nothing, and poison men's minds to the most pitiless retaliations, ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... Being. This, though it take not away the being of a God, yet, since it denies one and the first great piece of his workmanship, the creation, let us consider it a little. Matter must be allowed eternal: Why? because you cannot conceive how it can be made out of nothing: why do you not also think yourself eternal? You will answer, perhaps, Because, about twenty or forty years since, you began to be. But if I ask you, what that YOU is, which began then to be, you can scarce tell me. The matter whereof you are made began ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke
... His Excellency the Governor, questions the possibility of adding another despatch to the hundred and fifty already composed in illustration of the art of making despatches, as Soyer makes soup, out of nothing; and oppressed by the subject, becomes dormant in his chair of state; the clerks in the neighbouring offices no longer exhibit the uplifted countenance which, as justly observed by Sallust, distinguishes man from all other creatures; nothing is to be seen of them but masses of hair ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... it and ask it for drafts on London, which, by remitting this bill to be sold in London, it would be able to supply. International finance is so often regarded as a machinery by which paper wealth is manufactured out of nothing, that it is very important to remember that all this paper wealth only acquires value by being ultimately based on something that is grown or made and wanted to keep people alive or comfortable, or at least happy in ...
— International Finance • Hartley Withers
... matter second to none in importance. What is obnoxious and absurd in this doctrine may be traced to the idea contained in the Old Testament, that man is the creation of an external will, which called him into existence out of nothing. It is quite true that genuine moral excellence is really innate; but the meaning of the Christian doctrine is expressed in another and more rational way by the theory of metempsychosis, common to Brahmans and Buddhists. According to this theory, the qualities which distinguish one man ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer
... what do you think of Daphne's dress? Isn't it pretty? It was made by Ogburn, all out of nothing, in ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson
... and substance, in one glory and kingdom undivided. He then is in three persons one God, without beginning, and without end, eternal and everlasting, increate, immutable and incorporeal, invisible, infinite, incomprehensible, alone good and righteous, who created all things out of nothing, whether visible or invisible. First, he made the heavenly and invisible powers, countless multitudes, immaterial and bodiless, ministering spirits of the majesty of God. Afterward he created this visible world, heaven ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... dollars a month and his grub, and had promised more if he succeeded. He had found iron ore. It was good enough to win the bet, but was it good enough for Clark? and if it was not good enough for Clark the mortgage would have to be met out of nothing. ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... with the curious Italian name—think of it, ten years, the time that it takes for a private to become a non-commissioned officer, or a clerk to win a fifty-pound advance in his salary. He had sprung in an instant out of nothing into everything. One month people were asking who he was, the next he had broken out in the north of Italy like the plague; Venice and Genoa withered at the touch of this swarthy ill-nourished boy. He cowed the soldiers in ...
— Uncle Bernac - A Memory of the Empire • Arthur Conan Doyle
... that people should not be frank in; however, I am only come now to beg you will tell me, madam, when it is to be;—and don't think I ask out of nothing but curiosity, for I have a very great reason ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... long story out of nothing," he exclaimed, impatiently; "and fooling my time here ...
— Daisy Brooks - A Perilous Love • Laura Jean Libbey
... which to make one; there was no timber near! We were in the middle of a naked prairie. The universal mesquite—the algar obia glandulosa— excellent for such a purpose—grew nowhere in the neighbourhood. Who was to find the torch? Even Rube's ingenuity could not make one out of nothing. ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... and it is not like you. You have no real trouble. Jane Harlow is having what any girl would call a happy time. There is nothing wrong in it. She does not forget you, and you must not make troubles out of nothing, or else real troubles are sure to come. Surely you know who to go to in ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... his way back to St. Pancras, the draft in payment absorbing practically all his balance. Eileen was delighted with it. They spent that evening in the nearest approach to festivity that they had known for several years. It was, as it were, the crown of the long waiting for something out of nothing. All those little acerbities which creep into the manner of two married people who are always trying to round the corner fell away, and they sat together in one large chair, talking and laughing over ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... to the opinion that there is no work so tiring as writing, that is, not for fun, but for publication. Other work has a repetition, a machinery, a reflex action about it somewhere, but to be on the stretch inventing fillings, making them out of nothing, making them as good as you can for a matter of four hours leaves me more inclined to lie down and read Dickens than I ever feel after nine hours ramp at Redway's. The worst of it is that you always think the thing ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... the interview which the governor had with him. The destitution of the State of everything like military material and equipment was very plainly put, and the magnitude of the task of building up a small army out of nothing was not blinked. The governor spoke of the embarrassment he felt at every step from the lack of practical military experience in his staff, and of his desire to have some one on whom he could properly throw ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... [human] merits and worthiness must come to naught." (Weimar 1, 161.) "Not such are blessed as have no sins or extricate themselves by their own labors, but only those whose sins are graciously forgiven by God." (167.) "It is characteristic of God (es ist Gottes Natur) to make something out of nothing. Hence God cannot make anything out of him who is not as yet nothing.... Therefore God receives none but the forsaken, heals none but the ill, gives sight to none but the blind, quickens none but the dead, makes pious none but the sinners, makes wise none but the ignorant,—in short, He has mercy ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... they did need all that while to save it up. For beauty-loving Berta with her eternally slim purse and hopelessly meagre account-book, the plan at first seemed only a vision of the moment. Nobody can save out of nothing, can she? Robbie Belle, however, had a stubborn fashion of clinging to an idea when once it became fixed. Her ideas, furthermore, were apt to be clean-cut and definite. This is how ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz
... anticipitate in war the resources of peace, and although the other nations of Europe have tried and trodden every path of force or folly in fruitless quest of the same object, yet we still expect to find, in juggling tricks and banking dreams, that money can be made out of nothing, and in sufficient quantity to meet the expenses of a heavy war by sea and land. It is said, indeed, that money cannot be borrowed from our merchants as from those of England. But it can be borrowed from our people. They will give you all the necessaries of war they produce, if, instead ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... series of events in time as having a beginning and possibly an end, or as being without beginning or end? What in fact are we to make of the theological idea of Creation, often further defined as Creation out of nothing? It is often suggested both by Idealists and by Realists that the idea of a creation or absolute beginning of the world is unthinkable. Such a view seems to me to be a piece of unwarrantable a ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... relieves you of a thousand cares. When you have company, is it not Madeleine who sees that everything is in order? If you give a dinner, is it not Madeleine who not only superintends all the preparations, but invents the most beautiful decorations for the table,—and out of nothing—out of leaves and flowers so common that no one would have thought of culling them, yet so wonderfully arranged that every one exclaims at their picturesque effect? When you have dull guests,—guests that put me to sleep, or out of patience,—is it not Madeleine who amuses them? ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... night. To-day we again spent in improving our billets. The sailor is always known as the handy man, but I doubt if he would have a look in even with amateur Tommies like ourselves. We made scrapers for each barn door out of nothing, mats to scrape our boots on out of straw, roadways over muddy places out of brushwood and tins, &c., and incinerators out of mud. We could easily ...
— Letters from France • Isaac Alexander Mack
... quiet, and it got out that the Commissioner was expecting the end of the world, and the graves were for those that wouldn't go to heaven! Kanakas are like that, you know—spreading the silliest rumors and making a lot out of nothing—though in this case they couldn't be blamed for being considerable scared. But Mr. Clemm knew how to turn everything to account, and on the principle that the church was the safest place to be found in on the Day of Judgment, ordered ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... of defect. But it could not be the same with the idea of a being more perfect than my own; for to derive it from nothing was manifestly impossible; and, because it is no less repugnant that the more perfect should follow and depend upon the less perfect than that something should come forth out of nothing, I could ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... minute a hare made a leap out from between his hands, and whether it was one of the cards that took that shape, or whether it was made out of nothing in the palms of his hands, nobody knew, but there it was running on the floor of the barn, as quick as any hare ...
— Stories of Red Hanrahan • W. B. Yeats
... spun, the mists under the hills on an autumn morning are but gross reflections of it; moonshine on lovers is earthy compared with it; song sung most charmingly and stirring the dearest recollections is but a failure in the human attempt to reach its embrace and be dissolved in it. It is out of Nothing that are woven those fine poems of which we carry but vague rhythms in the head:—and that Woman who is a shade, the Insaisissable, whom several have enshrined in melody—well, her Christian name, her maiden name, and, as I personally believe, her married name as well, is Nothing. I never see a ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... philosophers believe this; and yet the writers of this book know of nothing but actual present, and their god—who will no more endure another god as his equal than a citizen's wife will admit a second woman to her husband's house—is said to have created the world out of nothing for no other purpose but to be worshipped and ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... and Mona was not. This might cause complications in the matter of invitations to entertainments. But Patty knew this would mostly redound to Mona's benefit. She would be asked on Patty's account to places where otherwise she would not have been invited. And Patty well knew SHE would be left out of nothing just ...
— Patty's Butterfly Days • Carolyn Wells
... stated the view with a rash emphasis, until one is forced to ask whether a mind which is originally nothing at all, can absorb, or as psychologists say, "apperceive" anything whatever. Nothing comes out of nothing, and nothing ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... than talent," du Chatelet had said one day (for Lucien and the Baron had made up their quarrel); "a plot below the surface rouses no one's attention. Intrigue, moreover, is superior to talent, for it makes something out of nothing; while, for the most part, the immense resources of talent only ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... in giving an air of grace and elegance to a room is astonishing. White curtains really create a room out of nothing. No matter how coarse the muslin, so it be white and hang in graceful folds, there is a charm in it that supplies the want of multitudes of ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... impenetrable mysteries of a being, whom you consider inconceivable to the human mind? You are the blasphemers, when you imagine that a being, perfect according to you, could be guilty of such cruelty towards creatures whom he has made out of nothing. Confess, your ignorance of a creating God; and cease meddling with mysteries, which ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... had looked closely at them and read the magic letters which were cut upon their edge, they said that the millstones were precious indeed, since they would grind out of nothing anything that the miller ...
— Stories to Tell Children - Fifty-Four Stories With Some Suggestions For Telling • Sara Cone Bryant
... badly—well, then, let things go on as they are.' But it was the pretension to a part in the name of Ormont which so violently offended the democratic aristocrat, and caused her to resent it as an assault on the family honour, by 'a woman springing up out of nothing'—a ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... with God, our eternal need. If gratitude and love immediately followed the supply of our needs, if God our Saviour was the one thought of our hearts, then it might be unnecessary that we should ask for anything we need. But seeing we take our supplies as a matter of course, feeling as if they came out of nothing, or from the earth, or our own thoughts, instead of out of a heart of love and a will which alone is force, it is needful that we should be made feel some at least of our wants, that we may seek him who alone supplies all of them, and find his every gift ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... concerns us now in this great ninth chapter is the faith that was so warmly wooed up out of nothing to a thing of courageous action and personal devotion to Jesus. It is fairly fascinating to watch the man move from birth-blind hopelessness through clay-anointed surprise and wonder and Siloam-walking ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon
... Bihan," I said impatiently, "translate it, won't you? You and Max Fortin make a lot of mystery out of nothing, it seems." ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... Jane; "I have my man in the boat to watch through the window. What a singular being he is! I think he spends hours in that boat, and what he does I can't conceive. There it is, quietly anchored, and there is he in it. I never saw anybody but myself who could get up so much industry out of nothing. He has all his housework there, a broom and a duster, and I dare say he has a cooking-stove and a gridiron. He sits a little while, then he stoops down, then he goes to the other end. Sometimes he goes ashore in that absurd little tub, with a stick that ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... one direction was his erring force more felt than in the creation of holiday literature as we have known it for the last half-century. Creation, of course, is the wrong word; it says too much; but in default of a better word, it may stand. He did not make something out of nothing; the material was there before him; the mood and even the need of his time contributed immensely to his success, as the volition of the subject helps on the mesmerist; but it is within bounds to say that he was the chief agency in the development of holiday literature as we have known it, as he was ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... talk, weaving stories out of nothing, finding laughter and tears in what she would have passed by unnoticed. She talked to him about herself, about the daily doings of her home, its sadness and isolation since her father died. He had been ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... assistance of Bavaria and the League, than by his own armies; and it was this dependence on equivocal allies, which he was endeavouring to escape, by the appointment of a general of his own. But what possibility was there of raising an army out of nothing, without the all-powerful aid of gold, and the inspiriting name of a victorious commander; above all, an army which, by its discipline, warlike spirit, and activity, should be fit to cope with the experienced troops of the northern conqueror? In all Europe, there was but one man equal ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... char-a-banc—the crank-shaft's broken," Ferdinand said to me, as he asked me for the tenth time to get up beside him; "I've got no one, and I'm going to win this race. If you could conjure up a new crankshaft out of nothing, you would still be three behind the last in, and all the town out to laugh at you. Get up, Lal, and have done with it. I tell you I knew ...
— The Man Who Drove the Car • Max Pemberton
... is born our friend; while his eyes are still closed, already he believes in us: even before his birth, he has given himself to man. But the word "friend" does not exactly depict his affectionate worship. He loves us and reveres us as though we had drawn him out of nothing. He is, before all, our creature full of gratitude and more devoted than the apple of our eye. He is our intimate and impassioned slave, whom nothing discourages, whom nothing repels, whose ardent trust and love nothing can impair. He has solved, in an admirable and touching manner, the terrifying ...
— Our Friend the Dog • Maurice Maeterlinck
... literary epoch differ according as that epoch is primal or derivative. There are those edifices of letters which start up, not indeed out of nothing, but out of things wholly different. Produced by a shock or a revelation, as two gases lit will, in a sharp explosion, unite to form a liquid wholly unlike either, so after a great conquest, a battle, the sudden preaching of a creed, these primal literatures appear ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... shutting their eyes to the absurdity and unreasonableness of such a theory, believe that human souls are created out of nothing at the time of the birth of their bodies and that they continue to exist throughout eternity either to suffer or to enjoy because of the deeds performed during the short period of their earthly existence. Here the question arises why should a man be held responsible throughout ...
— Reincarnation • Swami Abhedananda
... expected. Undisturbed by the sensation he knew he was creating among his employes, he moved about, accompanied by his manager, making last suggestions, giving final instructions, and radiating fond, farewell glances at all the loved details of the business he had built out of nothing. ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... fancies, nor believe there is any Governor of the whole universe this year but God the Creator, who by his Word rules and governs all things, in their nature, propriety, and conditions, and without whose preservation and governance all things in a moment would be reduced to nothing, as out of nothing they were by him created." It is a most sound and salutary truth, not to be forgotten in times of commercial distress, nor even in discussing financial questions, remote as they may seem to be from the domain of ethics. God rules in the market, as he does on the mountain; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... has often been referred to as the one "who made The Ladies' Home Journal out of nothing," who "built it from the ground up," or, in similar terms, implying that when he became its editor in 1889 the magazine was practically non-existent. This is far from the fact. The magazine was begun in 1883, and had been edited by Mrs. Cyrus H. K. Curtis, for six years, under her maiden name ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... Constitution of the United States and of the historic development of society. An honest acceptance of the law of gravitation would banish many popular delusions; a comprehension that something cannot be made out of nothing would dispose of others; and the application of the ordinary principles of evidence, such as men require to establish a title to property, would end most of the remaining. How far is our popular education, which ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... enthusiasm of Moses Stuart made him the father of exegetical science not only for America, but for all the English-speaking countries. His not less eminent pupil and associate, Edward Robinson, later of the Union Seminary, New York, created out of nothing the study of biblical geography. Associating with himself the most accomplished living Arabist, Eli Smith, of the American mission at Beirut, he made those "Biblical Researches in Palestine" which have been the foundation on which all later explorers have built. Another American ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... came out of nothing in the world but curiosity, and because she likes making people uncomfortable. She knew very well mother and ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... sentence gave rise to all the disputes of the old philosophers, from Parmenides down to Aristotle, and that was composed of three words, ex nihilo nihil—nothing can come out of nothing—upon which were raised the doctrines of the atomists, incorporealists, epicureans, theists, and atheists, and all the other races of dreamers that have disturbed the common sense, lethargy, or comfort of the world for thousands of years; so that nothing could have better proved the absolute nothingness ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... showed her standing behind a velvet chair and leaning her large but still shapely bust slightly over the chair. Her forearms, ruffled and braceleted, lay along the fringed back of the chair, and from one negligent hand depended a rose. A heavy curtain came downwards out of nothing into the picture, and the end of it lay coiled and draped on the seat of the chair. The great dress was of slate-coloured silk, with sleeves tight to the elbow, and thence, from a ribbon-bow, broadening to a wide, triangular climax that revealed quantities of ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... thus, not only the ass and the horse, but even man himself, the apes, the quadrupeds, and all animals might be regarded but as forming members of one and the same family. But are we to conclude that within this vast family which the Creator has called into existence out of nothing, there are other and smaller families, projected as it were by Nature, and brought forth by her in the natural course of events and after a long time, of which some contain but two members, as the ass and the horse, ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... met with any race, except Icelanders and Norwegians, who are so completely the slave of hard fact. It is astounding how difficult the average Manxman finds it to put himself into the mood of the poet. That anything could come out of nothing, that there is such a thing as imagination, that any human brother of an honest man could say that a thing had been, which had not been, and yet not lie—these are bewildering difficulties to the modern Manxman. That a novel can be false and yet true—that, well that's ...
— The Little Manx Nation - 1891 • Hall Caine |
