"Vacuity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... series of papers. The "Tatler's" personality was Isaac Bickerstaff, Physician and Astrologer; as to years, just over the grand climacteric, sixty-three, mystical multiple of nine and seven; dispensing counsel from his lodgings at Shire Lane, and seeking occasional rest in the vacuity of thought proper to his club ...
— Isaac Bickerstaff • Richard Steele
... our cautious march became for me a mere, mechanical, wearisome task, for on ordinary occasions it was my custom to maintain a pace of greater rapidity. Thus, eventually I sank into the semiconscious condition amid which the soul turns to vacuity, and one no longer thinks of oneself, but, on the contrary issues from one's personality, and begins to see objects with unwonted clarity, and to hear sounds with unwonted precision. Under my feet the seams in the ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... the balance is disturbed we are drawn into strange pathways, and our whole lives may be changed through the operation of what seems a most trivial case. In Bob's case the cause approached, all unheralded, in the person of Mr. Richard Cady, a youth whose magnificent vacuity of purpose was the envy of his friends. Comet-like, he was destined to appear, flash brightly, then disappear below the horizon of this tale. Mr. Cady greeted Bob with listless enthusiasm, teetering the while upon his cane like a ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... of Truth in the heart, there comes an overwhelming sense of error's vacuity, of the blunders which arise from wrong apprehension. The enlightened heart loathes error, and casts it aside; or else that heart is consciously untrue to the light, faithless to itself and to others, and so sinks ...
— Retrospection and Introspection • Mary Baker Eddy
... no scene so perfectly brings out the absolute vacuity of the British mind when one can get it free from the replenishing influences of the daily paper. Alpine talk is the lowest variety of conversation, as the common run of Alpine writing is the lowest form of literature. It is ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... Sydney Smith wielded in the early Edinburgh Review. But "calling names," and echoing the commonplaces of affected contempt, that is too weak even for Timon to chuckle over, except as evidence of mental vacuity. The real object in honest controversy is to defeat your opponent and leave him a friend. But the Newtown Creek method is fatal to such a result. Of course that method often apparently wins. But it always fails when directed against a resolute and earnest purpose. ...
— Ars Recte Vivende - Being Essays Contributed to "The Easy Chair" • George William Curtis
... color, and weakened force—he would finally pause before a small picture on panel, representing two quaintly dressed figures in a dimly lighted room—dependent for its interest little on expression, and less on treatment—but eminently remarkable for reality of substance, vacuity of space, and vigor of quiet color; nor less for an elaborate finish, united with energetic freshness, which seem to show that time has been much concerned in its production, and has had no power ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... where there is good encampment and water, and the natives are principally Hindoos. Early on the following morning we began to cross the Luckenwarry Ghaut; the roads were steep and not above ten feet wide, and on each side a vacuity of about 250 feet deep. The light in the lantern being extinguished, and the moon being obscured, my horse, had it not been for the horse-keeper, would have precipitated me to the bottom; I instantly dismounted, and the horse-keeper led him till he was clear of the Ghaut. ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to India; of a Shipwreck on board the Lady Castlereagh; and a Description of New South Wales • W. B. Cramp
... of the season which is called Silly in the world of journalism, because the outer vacuity then responds to the inner, and the empty brain vainly interrogates the empty environment for something to write of, two friends of the Easy Chair offered to spend a holiday in search of material for a paper. The only conditions they made were that the Easy Chair should ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... you refer literature to the standards of life, common-sense will at once decide which quality should count heaviest in your esteem. You will be in no danger of weighing a mere maladroitness of manner against a fine trait of character, or of letting a graceful deportment blind you to a fundamental vacuity. When in doubt, ignore style, and think of the matter as you would think of ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... draughtsmanship, and the felicity of his decorative design. But all this self-conscious skill, this ingenious affectation, this ostentatious muscularity, this immense superficiality—I feel always now a spiritual vacuity behind it which leaves me cold and critical. Every famous achievement of Raphael's, when I come upon it for the first time, repels me with a fresh shock of disillusionment. I am unpleasantly reminded of Andrea del Sarto and ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... the heart would hunger and be empty of its true possession unless God Himself had flowed into it. It were but a poor advancement and the gain of a loss, if yearnings were made immortal, and the aching vacuity, which haunts every soul that is parted from God, were cursed with immortality. It would be so, if it be not true that the inheritance is nothing less than the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... think that they came from a small shop, probably from a small draper's shop. The parents were young people of twenty-five to thirty-five. He wore a black shiny frock coat—an "Albert" in America?—a high hat, little side whiskers and dark moustache and a look of amiable vacuity. His wife was oddly bedizened in black satin, with a wide spreading hat, not ill-looking, simply unmeaning. I fancy that she had at times, not too often, "a temper of her own." And the very small baby sat upon her knee. The party was probably ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... credible it is not needful here to enquire. The deeper question, into which this finally merges, is, whether any one of these is even conceivable in the true sense of the word." He shows that, since the mind refuses to accept the transformation of absolute vacuity into the existent, the theory of self-creation forces us back to a potential Universe whose self-creation was transition to an actual Universe, and that then, we must explain the existence of the potential ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... portion of the town is a rather spacious and irregularly shaped vacuity, surrounded by houses and shops, some of them old, with red-tiled roofs, others wearing a pretence of newness, but probably as old in their inner substance as the rest. The people of Uttoxeter seemed very idle ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... her head towards the gleam of light that shot through the narrow slit which served for a window, "Is he not there?—stand out o' the light, and let me look upon him ance mair. But the darkness is in my ain een," she said, sinking back, after an earnest gaze upon vacuity—"it's a' ended now, ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... back in his eyes, away beyond the visible organs, there came a gleam of greater consciousness, a realization of life around him. His mouth, like a rent in an old, battered purse, gaped, and though no teeth were there, the vacuity seemed to smile feebly. ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... which was of necessity always clean. I don't know how much fancy there was in this; but there is no fancy in saying that the lassitude of tired-out operatives, and the languor of imaginative natures in their periods of collapse, and the vacuity of minds untrained to labor and discipline, fit the soul and body for the germination ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... wide-spread knees and broadly-painted draperies, a striking contrast to the weak attitudes and niggling robes of the central group. Signorelli has indeed hardly altered the childish chubby features of the Deacon in the middle, nor the benevolent vacuity of the two Bishops, so different to his own ...
— Luca Signorelli • Maud Cruttwell
... because it is only in society that the Disagreeable Girl can play a prominent part, assuming the center of the stage. Society, in the society sense, is built upon vacuity; its favors being for those who reveal a fine capacity to waste and consume. Those who would write their names high on society's honor roll, need not be either useful or ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... Female, who is sitting smiling with vacuity beneath the bell-pull). So it is you who have sounded the alarm! What is ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... fascinating, and, like the announcement of Haydon, may give practical hints to artists and others. But no intellectual process or ingenuity can make up for the absence of emotional warmth and refined selection. "Beauty, the foe of excess and vacuity, blooms, like genius, in the equilibrium of all the forces," says Jean Paul. "Beauty," says Hemsterhuis, "is the product of the greatest number of ideas in the shortest time," which is like the Italian definition, il ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... how much of that violence of will and restless activity and resolute force was due less to confidence, than to the urgent necessity which every one of us has felt, at some season and under some influence, of filling up spiritual vacuity by energetic material activity. Was this the secret of the mysterious charm that scenes of violent strife and bloodshed always had for Byron's imagination, as it was perhaps the secret of the black transformation of the social faith of '89 ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 3: Byron • John Morley
... a hysterical outcry from a person whose family is already tottering. It is at least certain that a great many of these cornerstones of society are tottering, and why? Because there dwell in them triviality and vacuity, which prepare the way of the devil. Who can think that intellectual divergence, disagreement upon great public questions, would disrupt a family worth holding together? On the contrary, nothing save a community of great interests—whether in agreement or ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... overtake him as to the captain's competency to navigate his ship. The ignoramus must have lost his way, and drifted into the outer confines of creation, the region of the everlasting lull, introductory to a positive vacuity. ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... were discouraged and thwarted; and after the positive lessons were over, and her education was said to be finished, she felt vacuity and ennui when Jane rejoiced in full employment. The housekeeping was ostensibly taken by the sisters in alternate weeks; but though Jane relinquished the keys for the stated period, she never relinquished the superintendence. She remembered what Elsie forgot; she looked forward ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... the proceedings of a painter that serves me, I had a mind to imitate his way. He chooses the fairest place and middle of any wall, or panel, wherein to draw a picture, which he finishes with his utmost care and art, and the vacuity about it he fills with grotesques, which are odd fantastic figures without any grace but what they derive from their variety, and the extravagance of their shapes. And in truth, what are these things I scribble, other than grotesques and monstrous bodies, made of various parts, without ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... allowed to be directed to anything in particular in reading over the pairs. It must be left without a rudder or guide to float wherever it listeth. It is not to be "interfered with" by our will. What is this but intellectual dawdling? A method of Vacuity pure and simple—the exact opposite of Mental Assimilation. (4) If in reading over many times an entire series, only the ear and eye are mainly affected and the intellect is left to wander, much more must it wander here. In running over many words, the intellect might be arrested by chance. ...
— Assimilative Memory - or, How to Attend and Never Forget • Marcus Dwight Larrowe (AKA Prof. A. Loisette)
... Great and shadowy and strange was the world that night, no one seemed abroad; I and my little cracked voice drifted solitary through the silent mysteries. Sometimes I argued as I have told, sometimes I tumbled along in moody vacuity, sometimes my torment ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... occasion of the death of her son (dated March 30, 1776) he thus refers to the loss of his wife:—'I know that a whole system of hopes, and designs, and expectations is swept away at once, and nothing left but bottomless vacuity. What you feel I have felt, and hope that your disquiet will be shorter than mine.' Piozzi Letters, i. 310. In a letter to Mr. Elphinston, who had just lost his wife, written on July 27, 1778, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... "beloved," and "friend," until the thing or the person is taken away; until, in place of the bright, visible being, comes the awful and desolate shadow, where nothing is: where we stretch out our hands in vain, and strain our eyes upon dark and dismal vacuity. Yet, in that vacuity, we do not lose the object that we loved. It becomes only the more real to us. Our blessings not only brighten when they depart, but are fixed in enduring reality; and love and friendship receive their ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... deliberate, creative gossip is probably rare. In fact, gossip usually represents the need of a bored world to be entertained at any price, the restless ennui that must be forever talking or listening to fill the vacuity of its existence, to supply its lack of really vital interests. This demand naturally creates a supply of idle talkers, whose social existence depends on their ability to provide the entertainment desired; and nothing would seem to be so well-pleasing to the idle human ear as the whisper ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... remoteness and the inherent desolation of Boston they could not suppress some sighs, and in the mean time Aunt Melissa stepped into the waiting-room, which opened on the farther side upon the water, and sat contentedly down on one of the benches; the rest, from sheer vacuity and irresolution, followed, and thus, without debate, it was settled that they should wait there till the boat left. The agent, who was a kind man, did what he could to alleviate the situation: he gave them each the advertisement of his line of boats, neatly ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... a blind and orphan waif, is to ignore all reason. Aught that might be assumed as contingently coming to be could only have 'freedom' for its origin; and 'freedom' has not fertility or invention, and is not a reason for any special thing, but the very vacuity of a ground for anything in preference to its room. Neither is there in bare time any principle or originality where anything should come or go. . ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... couch, Ere we that strait have threaded. But when free We came and open, where the mount above One solid mass retires, I spent, with toil, And both, uncertain of the way, we stood, Upon a plain more lonesome, than the roads That traverse desert wilds. From whence the brink Borders upon vacuity, to foot Of the steep bank, that rises still, the space Had measur'd thrice the stature of a man: And, distant as mine eye could wing its flight, To leftward now and now to right dispatch'd, That cornice equal in extent appear'd. Not ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... he had passed the verge of the cataract. So the Confederate craft has reached the brink of destruction, and we may now look to see some frantic paddling in their air. Or shall we liken it to Milton's bad angel, flying to his new empire, but dropping into an unexpected "vast vacuity"? ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... His face was distended with a foolish smile like a baby's. He seemed to smile at all creation. He looked at his wife and Ellen; then his face again took on its expression of joyful vacuity. ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... of others against her own experience and observation. The thoughts of this orphan boy clung to her heartstrings with a fondness for which she herself was unable to account. He seemed to have been sent to her by Heaven, to fill up those intervals of languor and vacuity which deprived her of much enjoyment. Perhaps he was not less dear to her, because she well saw that he was a favourite with no one else, and because she felt, that to give him up was to afford the judgment of her husband and others a triumph over her ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... freshness. The sounding phrases repeated in the pulpit, or the equally empty phrases of the scientist, however good they were at their inception, are, in the writing of many persons, but theological and scientific cant relied upon by ignorant people to cover up the vacuity of their thought. One's own expression, even though it be not so elegant and graceful, is better than any worn-out, hackneyed phrase. Think for yourself; then say what you have thought in the best language you ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... proves—thanks to that instructor sage My Father, who knew better than turn straight Learning's full flare on weak-eyed ignorance, Or, worse yet, leave weak eyes to grow sand-blind, Content with darkness and vacuity. ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... gracefully backwards, and in some species so elegantly formed as to take the shape of a lyre on looking at them full in front. The females of some have smaller, smoother horns, but others are hornless. The skull has an anteorbital vacuity, with a small anteorbital fossa. The auditory bullae are large; "eye-pits small; groin-pits distinct; large feet-pits in all feet; knees tufted" (Jerdon). The face has a white band running from the outer side of the base of each horn down to the muzzle, the space between forming a dark ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... in death; Within himself, with eye of truth, he sees The All-soul, free from all activities. May His, may Shiva's meditation be Your strong defense; on the Great Self thinks he, Knowing full well the world's vacuity. 1 ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka
... his face you would have supposed he was thinking; but it was only that sort of foggy vacuity which goes by the name of 'a brown study.' He never thought very clearly or connectedly; and his apathetic reveries, when his mood was gloomy, were furnished forth in a barren and monotonous way, with only two or three frightful ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... fault with the dance in this respect is that it has in it a fascination that does not exist in the ordinary social amusement. Some persons complain that they can not get an evening to go off well without dancing. But this is only an open confession to mental vacuity, to intellectual poverty. For one need know but little to flourish at the dance. And always, where little is required, intellectually, little is given. It is the rule that those who are in the greatest need of mental cultivation and ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... and Picts, attentive to every advantage, rushed with redoubled violence into this vacuity. The Britons, who could find no protection but in slavery, again implore the assistance of their former masters. At that time Aetius commanded the imperial forces in Gaul, and with the virtue and military skill of the ancient Romans supported the Empire, tottering with ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... may be the argument in favor of the system, it is certainly as important that it should be assailed as that it should exist, and that it should be assailed from within; for, carried out unchecked to its last consequences, it results in sinking its victims into the realm of vapors and vacuity, its representative being the all-accomplished London man of fashion who committed suicide to save himself from the bore of dressing and undressing. Besides, in "good society," so called, the best sentiments and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... suddenly thought of Florence, the clog-dancer. He had scarcely thought of her for months. The complexity of the interests of life, and the interweaving of its moods, fatigued his mind into an agreeably grave vacuity. ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... dismayed by the sound of bells pealing out the arrival of Pedrito Montero, Sotillo had spent the morning in battling with his thoughts; a contest to which he was unequal, from the vacuity of his mind and the violence of his passions. Disappointment, greed, anger, and fear made a tumult, in the colonel's breast louder than the din of bells in the town. Nothing he had planned had come to pass. Neither ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... Neocles, the Athenian, his philosophical sentiments being the same with those of Democritus, affirms that the principles of all being are bodies which are only perceptible by reason; they admit not of a vacuity, nor of any original, but being of a self-existence are eternal and incorruptible; they are not liable to any diminution, they are indestructible, nor is it possible for them to receive any transformation of parts, or admit of any ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... purpose, sprang his leading and most effective qualities. He was never very ready to talk about himself, but when asked what he regarded as his master secret, he always said, 'Concentration.' Slackness of mind, vacuity of mind, the wheels of the mind revolving without biting the rails of the subject, were insupportable. Such habits were of the family of faintheartedness, which he abhorred. Steady practice of instant, fixed, effectual ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... a low tone, and assuming a quite unnecessary look of vacuity for the benefit of the husband, who gazed across the dim-lit room at them, "don't behave like an idiot; faithful wives never let their husbands see them looking like that at another man's fingers. What do you think of our monsher? He's a pretty enough ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... thanks to the later practical explanation of the stage-driver's vision—and curtly refused to talk about it. But, more significant to Duchesne, and perhaps more perplexing, was a certain morose abstraction, which took the place of his former vacuity of contentment, and an intolerance of his attendants, which supplanted his old habitual trustfulness to their care, that had been varied only by the occasional querulousness of an invalid. His daughters sometimes found him regarding ...
— A Millionaire of Rough-and-Ready • Bret Harte
... at him, noting with a swift, informed scrutiny how he sprawled against the wall, and what vacuity his ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... was stopped by an abrupt descent. I set down the advancing foot with caution, being aware that I might at the next step encounter a bottomless pit. To the brink of such a one I seemed now to have arrived. I stooped, and stretched my hand forward and downward, but all was vacuity. ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... quarrel for dessert. Miss Whiffle had stuffed me with suet, in meat and pudding, to a point of stupefaction that stopped short only of absolute insensibility; and in this state I took up my usual post at the window, awaiting in swollen vacuity ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... used to think, letting her thoughts wander as the old lady rambled on, was an unfortunately misplaced person. She had none of the qualities of the great lady, nothing spiritual or mental with which to fend off the vacuity of old age. As a girl, a bride, a young matron, she had not shown her lack so pitiably. But now, at sixty-five, Mrs. Saunders had no character, no tastes, no opinions worth considering. She liked to read the paper, she liked her flowers, although she took none of the actual care of them, and she ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... change took place in me. I began to experience at first times of mental vacuity, of cessation of life, as if I did not know why I was to live or what I was to do. These suspensions of life always found expression in the same problem, 'Why am I here?' and then 'What next?' I had lived and lived and gone on and on till I had drawn near a precipice; ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... January; and should it be decided on a scrutiny that the seat belonged to our hero, then he would enter upon his privilege in the following Session without any further trouble to himself at Tankerville. Should this not be the case,—then the abyss of absolute vacuity would be open before him. He would have to make some disposition of himself, but he would be absolutely without an idea as to the how or where. He was in possession of funds to support himself for a year or two; but after that, and even during that time, all ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... which to attach itself. They were talking of the immense caves of Maastricht, how they stretch themselves out into deep passages and vast squares, in which sound is lost, and where the light, which cannot reach the nearest object, only glimmers like a point of fire. In order to comprehend this vacuity and this darkness, the travellers let the guide extinguish his torch, and all is night; they are penetrated, as it were, with darkness; the hand feels after a wall, in order to have some restraint, some thought on which ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... of lunches, dinners, balls, operas, theatres, card-parties, and inane jabber," he answered. "A mixture of various kinds of food which people eat recklessly with the natural results,—dyspepsia, inertia, mental vacuity, and general uselessness. A few Court 'functions,' some picture shows, and two or three great races—and—that's all. Some unfortunate marriages are usually the ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... the same auburn as those of the man of yesterday. Indeed, the man of yesterday might have been this man with twenty years added on him, with the light of hope and ambition dimmed by contact with the world, and his youthful alertness and dash succeeded by the resigned vacuity of one who has seen none of his early dreams realized. Again did Miss Clarissa ask if he would have his purchases sent to his address, but this time it was not entirely curiosity and the perfunctory performance of a duty, ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... which were not anticipated even by the best informed. But though such observations escaped him, he never developed them. His concise remarks attracted no attention until time proved their truth. His good sense, full of acuteness, had early persuaded him of the perfect vacuity of the greater part of political orations, of theological discussions, of philosophic digressions. He began early to practice the favorite maxim of a man of great distinction, whom we have often heard repeat a remark dictated by the misanthropic wisdom of age, which was then startling to ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... not do anything; I tried to read, but I could not; I tried to eat, but my appetite was gone. I sat looking at the ocean as it rolled wave after wave, sometimes wondering whether it would ever bring a fellow-creature to join me; at others I sat, and for hours, in perfect vacuity of thought. The evening closed in, it was dark, and I still remained seated where I was. At last I returned to my bed, almost broken-hearted; but fortunately I was soon asleep, and my sorrows ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Frederick Marryat
... west toward Fourth, walking rapidly. Maida! Maida! The girl she had known for eighteen months in the Red Cross tea room! The girl who had sat through a year of war without ever changing the vacuity of her smile! Sat—that was it, positively sat. A woman with a figure like that had no right to a lover. And a cook! An ordinary cook, hired out by the week! His beady, close-set eyes and hair sleeked back. Like a rat! And ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... termed negative electricity in the theory of Dr. Franklin, as with what is termed positive electricity; but in that theory the negative electricity means a less quantity or total deprivation or vacuity of that fluid; now to condense negative electricity by lowering the suspended chain into the tankard ought to make it less negative; whereas in this experiment I am told it becomes more so, as appears by its stronger repulsion of cork balls suspended on silk strings, and previously ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... reach us from the nearest fixed star. A sphere having the Sun at its centre and this nearest star at its circumference would have a diameter of upwards of fifty billions of miles; the volume of the orb when compared with the dimensions of this circular vacuity of space is as a small shot to a globe 900 miles in diameter. It has been estimated by Father Secchi that, if a comet when at aphelion were to arrive at a point midway between the Sun and the nearest fixed star, it would require one hundred million years in ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... substance out into the veins. Then the veins themselves, when the rock leaves them open by its contraction, act with various power of suction upon its substance;—by capillary attraction when they are fine,—by that of pure vacuity when they are larger, or by changes in the constitution and condensation of the mixed gases with which they have been originally filled. Those gases themselves may be supplied in all variation of volume and power from below; or, slowly, by the decomposition of the rocks themselves; ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... politicians may divert the order of things, but they cannot change our nature—they may create an universal taste for literature, but they will never unite it with habits of industry; and until they prove how men are to live without labour, they have no right to banish the chearful vacuity which usually accompanies it, by substituting reflections to make it irksome, and propensities ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... Xerxes, whose names burst upon us with dim light out of a black antiquity? Even they were but shadows on a screen, just seen and disappearing. What kings and kingdoms came before them and passed away? Has history no record? Not a word. Only black vacuity has been left behind them. And there was that other empire of the East, that of the Hittites, which we now know ruled Asia Minor and Syria and contested the rule of the world with Assyria and Egypt centuries before Agamemnon and Achilles, but so utterly buried and forgotten that not a line ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... ancient caverns of the Lebanon troglodytes in the cliffs overhanging the river of Wadi Kadeesha, and found nothing there but blind bats, and mosses, and dreary vacuity. No, not a vestage of the fossil is there, not a skull, not a shinbone. We have also inquired in the monasteries near the Cedars, and we were frankly told that no monk to-day fancies such a life. And if he did, he would not give ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... her head very erect; the red spots in her cheeks glowed like double peonies; her two thin curls, done in oil for the occasion, hung straight and stiff like pendant icicles nigrescent; her sparkling black eyes looked apparently into vacuity, while they were really beholding the acme of all her hopes. She was thinking in that supreme moment of her life how very providential it was that she had thrown overboard Mr. Freeman Clarke. Whether he was picked up or whether the sharks devoured him, it occurred ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... troubled seas that are there; when the ivory-tusked Pequod sharply bowed to the blast, and gored the dark waves in her madness, till, like showers of silver chips, the foam-flakes flew over her bulwarks; then all this desolate vacuity of life went away, but gave place to sights more dismal ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... results of the Education Act, Professor Magnus Maclean says: "Among the good things that education has brought the Highlanders, are a knowledge of English, wider social and political interests, a brighter intelligence and brighter outlook, freedom from mental vacuity and traditional superstitions." ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... mental was'e," he insisted with owl-like wisdom. "Two years my life spent inalleshual vacuity. Los' idealism, got be physcal anmal," he shook his fist expressively at Old King Cole, "got be Prussian 'bout ev'thing, women 'specially. Use' be straight 'bout women college. Now don'givadam." He expressed his lack of principle by sweeping a seltzer ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... by the roadside of the intelligible. The only altruism is that which can defy the cold brutality of things as they are, and convince us with things as they are not. Thus alone can the contemplation of art bring us back to primal infelicity, and restore in our souls the perfect vacuity of infants and cows. Thus only can we achieve the suffusion of vision ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 11, 1914 • Various
... opened a volume of songs she had neither strength nor will to persevere even through the first, and, rising from the instrument, she walked across the room, stretching her arms in a feverish despair. She had not eaten for many hours, and out of the vacuity of the stomach a dimness rose into her eyes. Pressing her eyes with her hand, she leaned ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... Missions do not attract to Christ many men of education; not even among those who have been trained within their own schools. Educated natives, as a general rule, will stand apart from the truth; maintaining, at the best, a state of mental vacuity which hangs suspended, for a time, between an atheism, from which they shrink, and a Christianity, which fails to overcome their fears and constrain their allegiance." Extract from Letter of the Anglican Bishops of India, addressed ...
— The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan • H. G. Keene
... as he was in mental courage, was almost paralysed by the shock when he discovered that his mother's spirit had fled; and for some time he remained by the side of the bed, with his eyes fixed upon the corpse, and his mind in a state of vacuity. Gradually he recovered himself; he rose, smoothed down the pillow, closed her eyelids, and then clasping his hands, the tears trickled down his manly cheeks. He impressed a solemn kiss upon the pale white forehead of ...
— The Phantom Ship • Frederick Marryat
... not mere vacuity?" "Victor! How can you? But you haven't talked with her. You must to-morrow. Good-night." She gathered up her trailing skirts and started down the corridor. Suddenly she turned back. "For Heaven's sake!" she whispered, in an awed tone, "I never even ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... Can you imagine that he is a backslidden communist, and is sure he will go to hell (if there be such an excellent institution) for the luxury in which he lives? And can you believe that, though it is gaily expressed, the thought is hag and skeleton in every moment of vacuity or depression? Can you conceive how profoundly I am irritated by the opposite affectation to my own, when I see strong men and rich men bleating about their sorrows and the burthen of life, in a world full of 'cancerous paupers,' ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... point of the story is lost unless we are made to feel the slow crawling of time, while Eugenie waited; but what is there in her life to account for the time, to bridge the interval, to illustrate its extent? Balzac has to make a long impression of vacuity; Eugenie Grandet contains a decidedly ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... she was not," said the girl, gravely. She looked hurt, as if she had been unfairly forced to the logic of her postulate, and Hewson was not altogether pleased with himself; but at least he had had his revenge in making her realize the man's vacuity. ...
— Questionable Shapes • William Dean Howells
... to look at his hearers, if he would have his hearers look at him. Among the faults to be avoided in the management of the eye, Dr. Porter notices particularly that unmeaning look which the eye "bent on vacuity" has, resembling the inexpressive glare of the glass eye of a wax figure; that indefinite sweep of the eye which ranges from one side to the other of an assembly, resting nowhere; and that tremulous, roving cast of the eye, and winking of the eyelid, which is in direct contrast to an open, ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... impressions of the senses were completely obliterated, as they are in deep sleep. Now would any memory remain to him of what had happened while he was awake. Would his soul find itself in a state of vacuity? Would it be incapable of having any experiences? This is a question that can only be answered if conditions like or similar to those under discussion can actually be brought about. If the soul is capable of experiencing anything, ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner
... to pay, the guest-houses, with their straw-coloured wine in quaint carafes, the rich stews served in grey earthenware dishes streaked with blue, the dancing, the caressing, the singular absence of all elderly women, strikes on the mind with a quite peculiar sense of boredom and vacuity, because Morris seems to have eliminated so many sources of human interest, and to have conformed every one to a type, which is refreshing enough as a contrast, but very tiresome in the mass. It will not be enough to have got rid of the combative and sordid and vulgar elements of the world ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... style and the specious arguments of fatality. This is precisely the case of M. Zola. The glamor of his disturbing theory, which annihilates free will, gives to his works a philosophical appearance. He conceals its vacuity beneath forms of a highly-colored style, an amiable negligence and a facility that is benumbing to thought. As he asserts nothing, no one dreams of contradicting, and one finds himself entwined in a network of repulsive depravity without a ray of ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... identities had existed that he had forgotten. But any effort to recall any specific person came to nothing, or else he only succeeded in reviving images manifestly confused with characters in fiction or history. Then Sally, who was rather incredulous about this complete vacuity of mind, had said to him: "But come now, Mr. Fenwick, you don't mean to say you don't know if you ever had a sweetheart?" And he had replied with a laugh: "My dear Miss Sally, I'm sure I must have had plenty of sweethearts. Perhaps it's because I had so many that I have forgotten them ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... of renown. The necessary business of life, the immediate pleasures or pains of every condition, leave us not leisure beyond a fixed proportion for contemplations which do not forcibly influence our present welfare. When this vacuity is filled, no characters can be admitted into the circulation of fame, but by occupying the place of some that must be thrust into oblivion. The eye of the mind, like that of the body, can only extend its view ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... time the two ruffians, lethargic after an enormous breakfast, lay about idly in the shade and smoked. As I listened to their lazy, fragmentary conversation vast gulfs of mental vacuity seemed to open before me. I wondered whether after all wicked people were just stupid people—and then I thought of Aunt Jane—who ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... that she would respect the judgment neither of the people nor of the books. To be poor alone, to have to live without a husband, to look forward to a life in which there would be nothing of a career, almost nothing to do, to await the vacuity of an existence in which she would be useful to no one, was a destiny which she could teach herself to endure, because it might probably be forced upon her by necessity. Were her father to die there would ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... respectful hearing; and, from many private conversations with ladies and gentlemen of influence, we feel assured that we have done much by our gatherings in Saratoga and Newport to awaken thought among a new class of people. The ennui and utter vacuity of a life of mere pleasure is fast urging fashionable women to something better, and, when they do awake to the magnitude and far-reaching consequences of woman's enfranchisement, they will be the most ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... awakening interest in historical studies. In the spring of 1786, during an absence of the Koerners which deprived him of his wonted inspiration, he found himself unable to work. Letter after letter tells of laziness and mental vacuity. As he could do nothing else he took to desultory reading, and this did not satisfy him. 'Really', he wrote on ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... the brilliant qualifications for which he is distinguished. Proud without property, and sarcastic without being witty, ill temper he mistakes for superior carriage, and haughtiness for dignity: his study is his toilet, and his mind, like his face, is a vacuity neither sensible, intelligent, nor agreeable. He has few associates, for few will accept him for a companion. With his superiors in rank, his precedent honorary distinction yields him no consideration; with ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... But where we fail grievously is in our provision for average men; they are provided with feeble examinations in desultory and diffuse subjects, in which a high standard is not required. It is difficult to imagine a condition of greater vacuity than that in which a man leaves the University after taking a pass degree. No one has endeavoured to do anything for him, or to cultivate his intelligence in any line. And yet these are our parents in the next generation. And the only way in which ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Floats on the far empyrean, and below The yellow springs; but nowhere in great space Can he find aught of her. At length he hears An old-world tale: an Island of the Blest* — So runs the legend — in mid-ocean lies In realms of blue vacuity, too faint To be described; there gaily coloured towers Rise up like rainbow clouds, and many gentle And beautiful Immortals pass their days In peace. Among them there is one whose name Sounds upon lips ...
— A Lute of Jade/Being Selections from the Classical Poets of China • L. Cranmer-Byng
... what his father was worth, which, as he pointed out, was a trifle no man of the world dwelt on. Stalky envied aloud, and I delivered my first kick at The Infant's ankle. Thence we drifted to education, and the Average Army Man, and the desolating vacuity—I remember these words—of Army Society, notably among its womenkind. It appeared there was some sort of narrow convention in the Army against mentioning a woman's name at Mess. We were much surprised at this—Stalky would not let me express my surprise—but we took it from Mr. ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... autumn, why, he is come too late, that is all; and if one fine day he finds he can no longer be gay and laugh all over his face in delight of life, 'tis because he is old, no doubt; blame him not for that! And there can be no doubt that it requires a certain vacuity of mind to go about feeling permanently contented with oneself and all else. But we have all our softer moments. A prisoner is being driven to the scaffold in a cart. A nail in the seat irks him; he shifts aside a little, and feels ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun
... propping half our hearts upon a reed; We cease to mourn lost treasures mourned in vain, Lost treasures we are fain and yet not fain To fetch back for a solace of our need. For who that feel this burden and this strain, This wide vacuity of hope and heart, Would bring their cherished well-beloved again: To bleed with them and wince beneath the smart, To have with stinted bliss such lavish bane, To hold in lieu of all ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... of stir without movement, a mechanical and instinctive existence like that of the beaver; and then she felt an indefinable pride in her troubles, as she reflected that they had their source in eighteen months of such happiness as, in her eyes, was worth a thousand lives like this; its vacuity seemed to her horrible. However, she concealed this not very charitable feeling, and displayed for her parents her newly-acquired accomplishments of mind, and the ingratiating tenderness that love had revealed to her, disposing them to listen to ...
— At the Sign of the Cat and Racket • Honore de Balzac
... He was generally last at breakfast, but one morning happened to be first and waited some time alone; when afterwards twitted by Mrs. Thrale with irregularity, he replied, "Madam, I do not like to come down to vacuity." ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... furnished Eustacia with visions enough to fill the whole blank afternoon. Such sudden alternations from mental vacuity do sometimes occur thus quietly. She could never have believed in the morning that her colourless inner world would before night become as animated as water under a microscope, and that without the arrival of a single visitor. The words of Sam ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... figure, the indolent attitude of Tom Appleton, the blase young man whom he was so accustomed to meeting at billiard-tables, in clubs, or hotels. A tolerant, amiable expression saved the youth's smooth, handsome face from vacuity. He was dressed ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... the heart of man is not to be known by this test: a great fondness for music is a mark of great weakness, great vacuity of mind: not of hardness of heart; not of vice; not of downright folly; but of a want of capacity, or inclination, for sober thought. This is not always the case: accidental circumstances almost force the taste upon people: but, generally ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... society's assize advisedly, because it is only in society that the Disagreeable Girl plays a prominent part, assuming the center of the stage. Society, in the society sense, is built on vacuity, its favors being for those who reveal a fine capacity to waste and consume. Those who would write their names high on society's honor-roll need not be either useful or intelligent—they ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... appeared meek in dove-colour, like a vestal virgin—while Master Francis was in the costume, then prevalent, of Rob Roy Macgregor, a celebrated Highland outlaw. The Baronet was not more animated than ordinarily—there was a happy vacuity about him which enabled him to face a dinner, a death, a church, a marriage, with ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... single factor for the success of his splendid pose of the thorough gentleman. Yet she did not realize what an utter fool he was, so clever had he been in the use of the art of discreet silence. Norman suspected him, but could not believe a human being capable of such fathomless vacuity as he found whenever he tried to explore ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... 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, and ...
— The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi • Giacomo Leopardi
... thing, blowing smoke out of our mouths into other people's mouths, eyes, and noses, and having the same thing done to us. Yet I cannot account why a thing which requires so little exertion and yet preserves the mind from total vacuity has gone out." Or if we demand a keener relish for our meal than these {46} quiet joys of observation, there is of course the whole store of Johnson's sallies of wit, the things we all quote and forget and like to ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... cardinal symptom of the whole wide-spread malady. Faith is gone out; Scepticism is come in. Evil abounds and accumulates: no man has Faith to withstand it, to amend it, to begin by amending himself; it must even go on accumulating. While hollow langour and vacuity is the lot of the Upper, and want and stagnation of the Lower, and universal misery is very certain, what other thing is certain? That a Lie cannot be believed! Philosophism knows only this: her other belief is mainly that, in spiritual supersensual ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... earth's beauty into one gulp of vacuity and label beauty nothing, is ignorantly to caricature God's creation, which is unjust to human sense and [5] to the divine realism. In our immature sense of spirit- ual things, let us say of the beauties of the sensuous universe: "I love your promise; and shall know, some time, the spiritual ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... impenetrable mist may suddenly burst some great disaster or danger. Strange shapes appear to be forming themselves in the obscurity out of which they emerge, and the eye is wearied beyond expression with looking into a vacuity which continually promises to evolve into something, ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... fire the two ladies sat down together like watchers, in that silence and vacuity of mind which come after an exhaustive struggle ending in the recognition of the inevitable; a torpor of thought, a stupefaction of feeling, a purely negative state of joylessness sequent to the positive state of anguish. They were now both hungry, but in want of some present friend acquainted ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... bureaucracy in its full flower and odor," remarked Anderson as he recounted the affair to Kirtley. "It flourishes to a great extent by exaggerating mole hills into mountains with officious vacuity. It is so large that there is not enough serious work for it. So something often must be found to do. It is a civil army radiating the glory of the Kaiser. The more extensive it is, the more entrenched he is. It is official dry rot which is part of the price the people pay for having themselves ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... mystic relationship, felt by Dante and all the poets, which he bears to the genius of imaginative love. What I allude to is a more humble, but quite as gracious function, of leading those he takes away (with the infinitely tender gesture of the antique funereal Hermes), not into vacuity and the horrid blackness of oblivion, but into a place of safe and serene memory. In this capacity Death can be, even like his master, Time, a giver of gifts to us. For those are gifts to us, those friends he gathers together under hazier, tenderer skies into our ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... a pair of eyes in which unhealthy intelligence seemed to struggle in undetermined battle with utter vacuity; "why should you suppose ...
— When William Came • Saki
... been all mine," insisted the gallant bromide, fishing the trite phrase desperately from the grey vacuity of his thoughts. ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... was how he had been living all these days since his return home, without suffering so acutely from the vacuity of his existence and from inaction. How had he spent his time from rising ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... frankincense's fuming And vapours of the candle starlike Into the cloud her wings she buoys on. Each, that thus sets the pure air seething, May poison it for healthy breathing— But the Critic leaves no air to poison; Pumps out with ruthless ingenuity Atom by atom, and leaves you—vacuity. Thus much of Christ does he reject? And what retain? His intellect? What is it I must reverence duly? Poor intellect for worship, truly, Which tells me simply what was told (If mere morality, bereft Of the God in Christ, ...
— Christmas Eve • Robert Browning
... early youth of Vittorio Alfieri had been strangely vacant, dreary, one might almost say intellectually and morally sordid; and the strangest, the dreariest circumstance about them was exactly that this vacuity, this dreariness, this total want of all that can make the life of a boy and of a young man pleasant to our fancy or attractive to our sympathy, did not in the least depend upon any harshness or stinginess of fate. Indeed, perhaps, no man ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... smoothed for a moment the pillow of an "upper berth," and pleased better than the negro porter. Half a dozen of those days of too many paper novels, of too much tobacco, of too little else, followed each other with the sameness of so many raw oysters. Then there came a chill night of wide moonlit vacuity passed on the prairie by the side of the driver of a "jumper,"—a driver who slumbered, happy man!—and at peep of dawn I found myself standing, stiff and shivering, in a certain little Texas town. A much-soiled, white little street, a bit of greenish-yellow, treeless plain soft ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... not very deep in either the theory or the practice of art: but they had open eyes and minds, and could discern that some things were good and other bad—that some things they liked, and others they hated. They hated the lack of ideas in art, and the lack of character; the silliness and vacuity which belong to the one, the flimsiness and make-believe which result from the other. They hated those forms of execution which are merely smooth and prettyish, and those which, pretending to mastery, are nothing better than slovenly ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... if he found a fragment, he completed it: if brevity involved the thought in obscurity, he amplified: if the obscurity seemed incurable, he amputated: for superabundant wealth of conception he substituted vacuity; smoothed asperities; softened salient lights.' The result was that a medley of garbled phrases, additions, alterations, and sophistications was foisted on the world as the veritable product of the mighty sculptor's genius. That Michelangelo meant well to his illustrious ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... countenance of this officer, whose attenuated person otherwise bore traces of languor and debility, but too plainly marked the abstractedness and terror of his mind, while the set stiff features and contracted muscles of the face contributed to give an expression of vacuity, that one who knew him not might have interpreted unfavourably. Several times, during the inspection of his company at the early parade, he was seen to raise his head, and throw forward his ear, as if expecting to catch the echo of some horrible and appalling ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... lies in his power, he has done it; in the day of reckoning, Germany will judge how he has done it, and it is to be hoped that Germany will give him his just reward, for no punishment could be more fitting. The rest of the world already knows his vacuity, his utter uselessness, his criminal decadence. As his father was stripped of the Garter, so is he here shown stripped of the attributes to which, in earlier days, he made false claim. There remains a foolish knave posturing—and that is the ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... intended as an advice to a person who has become possessed of an article, and does not know what to do with it, like the old lady who won the principal prize in the lottery, said prize consisting of a live elephant! A "killogie" is, says Jamieson, "a vacuity before the fireplace in a kiln for ...
— The Proverbs of Scotland • Alexander Hislop
... Mrs. Highmore's vacuity exceeded my own. "Too 'flippant'? He has made it too oracular. Mr. Bousefield says he has killed it." Then perceiving my stupefaction: "Don't you know what has happened?" she pursued; "isn't it because in his trouble, poor love, he has sent for you that you've come? You've heard nothing ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... was staring at him with something in his face that was almost strong. When this man had entered the room, Arthur felt his heart give one great bound which almost choked him. There was a strange physical feeling of vacuity in his breast which seemed to paralyse his breathing powers, and his temples ...
— From One Generation to Another • Henry Seton Merriman
... broozled flesh and broken banes Are weel as flesh and banes can be, She beats the taeds that live in stanes An' fatten in vacuity! They die when they 're exposed to air, They canna thole the atmosphere; But her! expose her onywhere, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... of beauty and of an ideal. Personal virtue is not enough. The works called good are dry and jejune, soon consummated, often of questionable value, and leaving behind them when finished a sense of vacuity. You give a sum of money to a good object and walk away, but it does not satisfy the craving of the heart. You deny yourself pleasure to sit by the bedside of an invalid—a good deed; but when it is done there remains an emptiness of the soul. It is not ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... respecting angels, good and bad, the fall of man, and many other such matters, are due quite as much to Milton as to any other authority, his opinion must not be lightly disregarded. But though, when Milton's Satan 'meets a vast vacuity' where his wings are of no further service ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... and making her sit down, began to blow the covered fire on the hearth, where he had not long before "boiled his kettle" for his tea. Then closing the door, he lighted a candle, and Mary looking about her could scarcely believe the change that had come upon the miserable vacuity. Joseph sat down upon his anvil, and begged to know where she had just been, and how far she had run from the rascal. When he had learned something of the peculiar relations in which Mary stood to the family at Durnmelling, he began to think ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... of particulars, and diffuse its attention to distinct objects. The enumeration of the choughs and crows, the samphire-man, and the fishers, counteracts the great effect of the prospect, as it peoples the desert of intermediate vacuity, and stops the mind in the rapidity of its descent through ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... force.[33] It is a condition. As a force, there is a sense in which it is true to call liberty a negation. As a condition, though it may still be a negation, yet it may be indispensable for the production of certain positive results. The vacuity of an exhausted receiver is not a force, but it is the indispensable condition of certain positive operations. Liberty as a force may be as impotent as its opponents allege. This does not affect its value as a preliminary or accompanying ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... if Love supply Lustre to this now heavy eye, And with unwonted Spirit grace That fat[32:A] vacuity of face. Or if e'en Love, the mighty Love Shall find this change his power above; Some lovely maid perchance thou'lt find To read thy visage ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... education, of which both sexes are the advocates, and yours eminently the victims. If I could foresee that Theo would become a mere fashionable woman, with all the attendant frivolity and vacuity of mind, adorned with whatever grace and allurement, I would earnestly pray God to take her forthwith hence. But I yet hope by her to convince the world what neither sex appears to believe, that women ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... gave an indescribable tone of ghostliness to the whole exhibition. It is not in the least comical; it is neither comely nor ugly; it is colorless as mist,—expressionless, void,—it lies on the face like a vapor, like a cloud,—creating the idea of a spectral vacuity behind it.... ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... who was congenial. It wasn't that she had anything against Miss Thatcher and the rest of them—they just didn't have the same tastes. She thought a person ought to spend some of the time improving their minds. Although the expression was ambiguous, it served as a sort of sedative to the aching vacuity of the hours which Peter spent away from Siegel Brothers. He found himself spending as many as possible of them with Miss Havens. She had a way of making the frivolling talk of the supper table appear a warrantable ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... of his character: he must, upon no account, sustain a conversation with any spirit, lest he should appear, to his utter disgrace, interested in what is said: and when he is quite tired of his existence, from a total vacuity of ideas, he must affect a look of absence, and pretend, on the sudden, to ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... persistence of his cruelty: "Thy pity is nothing akin to thee." He has more in common with Romelio in "The Devil's Law-case," an assassin who misses his aim and flounders into penitence much as that discomfortable drama misses its point and stumbles into vacuity: and whose unsatisfactory figure looks either like a crude and unsuccessful study for that of Bosola, or a disproportioned and emasculated copy from it. But to him too Webster has given the fitful force of fancy or inspiration which finds expression in such sudden ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... lumber room? Will the wave of his Spirit never pass Over it through the insensate gloom? It lies alone in its lifeless world, As a frozen bud on the earth lies curled; Sightless and soundless, without a cry, On the flat of its own vacuity. ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... appeasing truths that, not without some wonder, he had so recently been able to discover within himself. During this profound and soothing communion with his innermost beliefs he remained staring at the carpet, with a portentously solemn face and with a dull vacuity of eyes that seemed to gaze into the blankness of an empty hole. Then, without stirring ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... penthouse of ill-humour; twelve 'all full' people; whiskerandi, gentle maidens, wives, and 'live widders,' ranged with solemn regularity like coffins in a vault. All fix their eyes where their minds are, on vacuity, and try to be for the time present, what they seem to be, as stupid as the devil, as if they dreaded some sympathetic contact, revealing bank-frauds and transactions in stocks. Who ever saw a smile in an omnibus, ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... happiness without real religion; and let children consider, that if the fear of God do not possess their own breasts, and influence their matrimonial choice, the delirium of pleasure will soon be past, and a sense of inexpressible vacuity be left behind. The world is a gay deceiver, and life a fleeting dream; the mists of illusion which gather over the morning of existence, gradually disappear as the day advances; and this imagined scene of enchantment, this fairy-land ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... nervous disorders, and yet others the diseases of the respiratory organs. Nobody studied all three. A plan of this sort could only have been conceived by Spanish professors, who, it may be said in general, are the quintessence of vacuity. ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... by works instead o' leanin' onto Him! Find Him, sez you! Git Him, sez you! Works is vain. Glory! glory!" he continued, with fluent vacuity and wandering, ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte |
