"Meaningless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... long conference with Superintendent Fowler, from which, to his great chagrin, P. C. Robinson was excluded, Furneaux went to the post office, dispatched an apparently meaningless telegram to a code address, and exchanged a few orthodox remarks with Doris and her father about the continued fine weather. While he was yet at the counter, Ingerman crossed the road ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... with evil eyes. The dragons were walking backwards it was true, but they kept their eyes fixed on him none the less. The eyes which he saw were, in truth, only the two buttons at the back of a frock-coat: perhaps some traditional memory of their meaningless character gave this half-witted prominence to their gaze. The slit between the tails was the nose-line of the monster: whenever the tails flapped in the winter wind the dragons licked their lips. It was only a momentary fancy, but the small clerk found it imbedded in his ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... critically with the music of "The Messiah"; and it seems almost as thankless a task to take the music of "The Creation" to pieces. Schiller called it a "meaningless hotch-potch"; and even Beethoven, though he was not quite innocent of the same thing himself, had his sardonic laugh over its imitations of beasts and birds. Critics of the oratorio seldom fail to point out these ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... ungraceful, but inclined to be restless. Her face did not betray the intelligence she possessed, as her eyes, though clear and well-shaped, were too close together. Her hawky nose was bent over a short upper lip and meaningless mouth. The chin showed more definite character than her other features, being large, bony and prominent, and she had curly, pretty hair, growing well on a finely-cut forehead; the ensemble healthy and mobile; ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... ultimate aims. He never accepted purely social invitations from white persons. He always claimed that he could best satisfy his social desires among his own people. He believed that the question of so-called "social equality" between the races was too academic and meaningless to be worthy of ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... done little except respond to meaningless introductions all the evening, and nothing could have pleased him less at the moment. But, somewhat awkwardly, he began to edge his way through the press in the wake of his hostess. The next moment he halted and stood stock-still in ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... revealed the window of the garden-room driven bodily inward, shutters and all, and now forming an inclined bridge over Dougal's ineffectual tubs. In front of it stood McGuffog, swinging his gun by the barrel and yelling curses, which, being mainly couched in the vernacular, were happily meaningless to Saskia. She herself stood at the hall door, plucking at something hidden in her breast. He saw that it was ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... transgression of its law. The daughters were educated on the same principles; they were kept in strict home seclusion; their mental development was of the lowest order, and did not extend beyond the narrowest limits of household life. And all this was crowned by an empty and meaningless etiquette, whose part it was to replace mind and culture, and which made life altogether, and especially that of a woman, a perfect ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... meaningless words and high-born phrases always set Socrates by the ears, and when he could corner a Sophist, he would very shortly prick his pretty toy balloon, until at last the tribe fled him as a pestilence. Socrates stood for sanity. The Sophist represented moonshine gone to seed, and these ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... he struck cruelly again at Pop Young's face. He seemed filled with fury, at least partly hysterical. It was the tension that space-travel—then, at its beginning—produced. It was meaningless savagery due to terror. But, of course, Pop was helpless to resent it. There were no weapons on the Moon and the mention of Sattell's name showed the uselessness of bluff. He'd pictured the complete set-up by the edge of the Big ...
— Scrimshaw • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... induced him to choose the strange life which he led, no one ever knew. All that I myself knew was that from his fifteenth year upwards he had been known as an imbecile who went barefooted both in winter and summer, visited convents, gave little images to any one who cared to take them, and spoke meaningless words which some people took for prophecies; that nobody remembered him as being different; that at, rare intervals he used to call at Grandmamma's house; and that by some people he was said to be the outcast son of rich parents and a pure, saintly soul, while others averred that he was a mere ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy
... light that shone in her eyes. What could have caused this transformation? The weapon which she held in her hands,—"the fourteenth paragraph of the Secret Instructions." What cared she that to her these words were utterly meaningless? It sufficed her to know that there was such a paragraph; he had ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai
... rejoined, "is that any reason, Bertrand, why you should pause to listen to the voices whose cry is meaningless? Think! Remember the blind folly of it all. A decade, a cycle of years, and the men who pass you in Pall Mall, and the women who smile at you from their carriages, will be dead and gone. You—you may become the Emperor of ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... be observed with surprise that both these tapus are for thoroughly sensible ends. With surprise, I say, because the nature of that institution is much misunderstood in Europe. It is taken usually in the sense of a meaningless or wanton prohibition, such as that which to-day prevents women in some countries from smoking, or yesterday prevented any one in Scotland from taking a walk on Sunday. The error is no less natural than it is unjust. The Polynesians have not been trained in the bracing, practical thought of ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... praise of his mother's dinner. She insisted upon aiding in the removal of plates from the table and for the most part her conversation was with Mrs. Gallant. What delicious salad, she must have the dressing recipe if Mrs. Gallant would be so kind as to give it to her. She told in details that were meaningless to John of the Spanish dishes her mother prepared, of the barbecue feasts of the old days she remembered as ...
— Spring Street - A Story of Los Angeles • James H. Richardson
... did not cheat, though Frank was ready if Bud had led him that way. Frank was ready for anything that Bud suggested. He drank when Bud drank, went from the first saloon to the one farther down and across the street, returned to the first with cheerful alacrity and much meaningless laughter when Bud signified a desire to change. It soothed Bud and irritated him by turns, this ready acquiescence of Frank's. He began to take a malicious delight in testing that acquiescence. He began to try whether he could not find the end of Frank's endurance in ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... how the little word tore its way into her very heart; she had to bite her lips to keep herself from crying out. She did not realize that the word was meaningless to him. ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... Promontor and did not mean to return again in a hurry, so he resolved to take his measures accordingly. He rushed forward to open the carriage door, helped Mr. John to get into the coach, wished him a most pleasant journey, no end of enjoyment and other meaningless things, all of which made much the same agreeable impression upon Mr. John as if an ant had crept into his boot and he could not kill it because he was in company. Only when the carriage door was shut to and he saw Margari's face no more did he begin ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... daylight shone over all the world, the endless forests stood up in their order. The lightning awoke and the tree fell and the sea gathered into mountains and the ship went down, and all these disconnected and meaningless and terrible objects were all part of one dark and fearful conspiracy of goodness, one merciless scheme of mercy. That this scheme of Nature was not accurate or well founded is perfectly tenable, but surely it is not tenable that it was not optimistic. We insist, however, upon ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... coach, shouting shrill, useless words. All about him were cries, commands, entreaties, confused, meaningless. Ten feet from the plate he launched himself through space, with arms outstretched. The dust was ...
— The New Boy at Hilltop • Ralph Henry Barbour
... The week had been warm, the spring was supposed to have begun early, and May Bartram sat, for the first time in the year, without a fire; a fact that, to Marcher's sense, gave the scene of which she formed part a smooth and ultimate look, an air of knowing, in its immaculate order and cold meaningless cheer, that it would never see a fire again. Her own aspect—he could scarce have said why—intensified this note. Almost as white as wax, with the marks and signs in her face as numerous and as fine as if they had been ...
— The Beast in the Jungle • Henry James
... he talked very well. Charnock had a keen eye for the ridiculous and a pretty wit, and was no longer handicapped by the fear of being dismissed. While the foreman replied with coarse but rather meaningless abuse, Charnock's retorts had a definite aim and hit their mark. He indicated with humorous skill the defects in his antagonist's looks and character, and Festing's gang laughed uproariously, while the borrowed workmen applauded as loudly as they durst. At length, ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... into this enormity. She had made a discovery which interested her infinitely more. Little Theodore, hitherto so inanimate, had sat up, listened, looked with a dawning of expression in the eyes that had hitherto been clear and meaningless as blue porcelain, and as the music ceased, his inarticulate hummings continued the same tune. Could it be that the key to the dormant senses was found? His eyes turned to the piano, and his finger pointed to it as soon as he found himself in the room with it, and the ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... are current in regard to the significance of these designs. To one school everything is symbolic of something or some religious conception; to the other the majority are meaningless save as decorations. I find the middle path the more conservative, and while regarding many of the designs as highly conventionalized symbols, believe that there are also many where the decorator had no thought of symbolism. I have ...
— Archeological Expedition to Arizona in 1895 • Jesse Walter Fewkes
... window-sashes, ornamentations, and what not. We are, I admit, hopelessly at the mercy of the housepainter, who knows much about estimates, something about paint, and little about color. I hope we are going to learn the difference between paint and color, the purely physical, meaningless thing on the one hand, and the intelligence-conveying, pleasure-giving element on ...
— The Art of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... time in her life Janet felt the exuberance of being in touch with affairs of import. Hitherto the mill had been merely a greedy monster claiming her freedom and draining her energies in tasks routine, such as the copying of meaningless documents and rows of figures; now, supplied with stimulus and a motive, the Corporation began to take on significance, and she flung herself into the work with an ardour hitherto unknown, determined to make herself so ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... out some meaningless things, and left her abruptly," said Hendrickson, with an impatient sweep of his hand. "I felt that her eyes were upon me, but had not the courage to lift my ...
— The Hand But Not the Heart - or, The Life-Trials of Jessie Loring • T. S. Arthur
... more the effects of lethodyne. Sebastian, with his head on one side, surveying the patient, promptly coincided. "Nervous diathesis," he observed. "Very vivid fancy. Twitches her hands the right way. Quick pulse, rapid perceptions, no meaningless unrest, but deep vitality. I ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... activity which is going on behind the scenes. Accordingly causal space belongs to a different order of reality to apparent space. Hence there is no pointwise connexion between the two and it is meaningless to say that the molecules of the grass are in any place which has a determinate spatial relation to the place occupied by the grass which we see. This conclusion is very paradoxical and makes nonsense of all scientific phraseology. The case is even worse if ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... always it is the letter that governs and originates the ornament. Only at the very end of its life, when the border has completely eclipsed the initial, is the idea of origin forgotten. Then, indeed, we find the border treillages of flower-stem or leaf-work starting from meaningless points of the design, or scattered shapelessly ...
— Illuminated Manuscripts • John W. Bradley
... miss the joy is to miss all. In the joy of the actors lies the sense of any action. That is the explanation, that the excuse. To one who has not the secret of the lanterns the scene upon the links is meaningless. And hence the haunting and truly spectral unreality of realistic books.... In each we miss the personal poetry, the enchanted atmosphere, that rainbow work of fancy that clothes what is naked and seems to ennoble what is base; in each, life falls dead like dough, instead of soaring away ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... Hdt. iii. 159. The theory that there were originally two parallel outer walls, that Darius razed one and Herodotus saw the other (Baumstark in Pauly-Wissowa, Real-Encycl. ii. 2696), is meaningless. There could be no use in razing one and leaving the other, which was almost as strong (Hdt. i. 181). It is, however, not quite certain that Herodotus (i. 181) meant that there were ...
— Ancient Town-Planning • F. Haverfield
... years ago—that is, within the memory of many a living man—gambling was 'the rage' in England, especially in the metropolis. Streets now meaningless and dull—such as Osendon Street, and streets and squares now inhabited by the most respectable in the land—for instance, St James's Square, THEN opened doors to countless votaries of the fickle and capricious goddess of Fortune; in the rooms of ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... kissing day." On this day the men claim the right to kiss every woman they meet, and, strange to say, every woman expects to be kissed, and is quite offended if she is passed by without being saluted in this way, which is so much more ancient and historic than the meaningless modern one of shaking hands. This Indian definition of New Year's Day vastly amused the boys, and when in the morning Mrs Ross and Wenonah came in, they, of course, had to be saluted in the orthodox fashion. ...
— Winter Adventures of Three Boys • Egerton R. Young
... gentle—for this was a lady to resent the easy self-effacement with which so many of her sex are deceived and flattered; he was not unmindful of the more honest compliments, yet he had the shrewdness to eschew the mere meaningless blague that no one could better employ with the creatures of Versailles, who liked their olives well oiled, or the Jeannetons and Mimis of the Italian comedy and the playhouse. Under his genial and shining ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... all illustrated by Gard's piano playing, which was cheap and meaningless strumming. He could rattle through a lot of popular tunes and stumble through a few short simple school-girl salon pieces. The Buchers were a real orchestra. With the ladies at the piano, the old Herr at the flute, Ernst at the violin and Rudi at the 'cello, they could play a dozen programmes ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... of wealth and property, the owners of which joined hands and lived together. This was the way in which he had married, and it was the way in which he intended his daughter to marry; love and passion were meaningless, if not vulgar words in his ears, and he conceived it impossible they should be otherwise to his only child. As for Lady Sarah, she was an unsympathetic creature, whose thoughts ran only on the ambition of seeing Julia married to some ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... O'Connor said, still miffed, "is extremely loose. I might go so far as to say that the statements you have made are, essentially, meaningless as a result of their lack ...
— Supermind • Gordon Randall Garrett
... they'll all turn up their noses at me," she added, after a moment, her face becoming wistful and gentle in its expression as she recalled some favorites whose whispered confidences and vows of eternal friendship seemed too recent to be meaningless and empty. ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... windows revealed brightly lighted rooms, and within I could see figures moving about. This was a fresh complication. We had always thought the house unoccupied. Presently—how long afterwards I do not know, for the ordinary measures of time, hours, minutes, and seconds are quite meaningless on such occasions—a man came out of the door and walked across the garden in my direction. Scarcely ten yards away he stopped and stood still, looking steadily towards me. I cannot describe the surge of panic which nearly overwhelmed me. ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... it seems, though withheld from us. Was received at Grussau here, and answered at some length (OEuvres, xxvii. i. 316), according to the specimen just given. Two more of hers follow, and four of the King's (ib. 317-322). Nearly meaningless, as printed there, without ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... unable to maintain even a decent semblance of unity and theological order. Political absolutism by its material costliness, its augmenting tendency to repress the application of individual energy and thought to public concerns, and its pursuit of a policy in Europe which was futile and essentially meaningless as to its ends, and disastrous and incapable in its choice of means, was rapidly exhausting the resources of national well-being and viciously severing the very tap-root of national life. To bring reason into an atmosphere ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... over, then came a pall of eternal silence, eternal unconsciousness. Of course it was a great, grim, ghastly tragedy, but he had to accept facts as they were. There was no God, no Providence, no justice; life was a hideous mockery, a meaningless tangle. No; he would never see her again, never hear her voice again, never catch that glad flash of her eyes which he had seen during their last meeting. It seemed to him as though he had entered an inferno, over the portals ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... man in green cloth coat and white breeches—walks up the steps of his reconquered palace like a man in a dream: his eyes are fixed apparently on nothing, he makes no movement to keep his too enthusiastic friends away: the smile upon his lips is meaningless and fixed. ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... the little nursery rhymes which to us may seem to be meaningless jingles, he is really peeping into the fields of literature, taking the first steps in those journeys that will end in Shakespeare, Browning and Goethe. When his infantile ear is caught by the lively rhythm and the catchy ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... has of course no difficulty in showing that the supposed injury to morality rests on a misconception of the real doctrine. If volitions, instead of being caused, are the products of arbitrary chance, morality becomes meaningless. We approve or disapprove of an action precisely because it implies the existence of motives, good or bad. Punishment and reward would be useless if actions were after all a matter of chance; and if merit implied the existence ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... wonderful that they do not append some other delectable title, such as 'The Gushing Girl of Girtham,' or 'The Glaring Girl of Glittering Girtham.' O Alliteration! Alliteration! what crimes have been wrought in thy name! Little dost thou think of the mischief thou hast done, flooding the world with meaningless titles and absurd phrases. How canst thou talk of 'Lyrics of Loneliness,' 'Soliloquies of Song,' 'Pearls of the Peerage'? Why dost thou stay thine hand? We long for thee to enrich the world with 'Dreams of a Dotard,' the 'Dog Doctor's ...
— The Romance of Mathematics • P. Hampson
... He longs to clasp them round his neck, yet is fearful lest his trembling fingers touching them as he performs his tantalising task may offend her. Anne thanks him, and apologises for having given him so much trouble, and he murmurs some meaningless reply, and ...
— John Ingerfield and Other Stories • Jerome K. Jerome
... to-day with patience or equanimity the dreadful sufferings of mankind. We have inherited Christianity without Christ; we have the painted shell of a religion, and that which rattles around within it is not the burning soul of the Great Iconoclast, but a cold and shriveled and meaningless tradition. Oh! for the quick-pulsing, warm-beating, mighty human heart of the man of Galilee! Oh! for his uplifted hand, armed with a whip of scorpions, to depopulate the temples of the world, and lash his recreant preachers into devotion to the cause of ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... of life, is to confess to a sort of creeping paralysis of the mind. To be weary is comprehensible enough. Yes, God knows I can understand the existence of weariness or exhaustion. To be bored even is natural enough, if one is bored by, say, forced inaction, or obligatory action of a futile, meaningless kind. But negative boredom; to be uninterested, not because adverse circumstances confine you to this or that barren and uncongenial milieu, but because you see nothing of interest in life as a whole; because life seems to you a dull, ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... brethren in holier danger, than those who had not yet partaken of his light, and therefore praying for them not merely as human beings, but as the human beings they were, he said to his Father in their hearing: 'I pray not for the world, but for them,'—not for the world now, but for them—a meaningless utterance, if he never prayed for the world; a word of small meaning, if it was not his very wont and custom to pray for the world—for men as men. Lord Christ! not alone from the pains of hell, or of conscience—not alone ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... meaningless, the bard seeing no necessity for throwing further light on the subject; but, as we wander through the bardic literature, gradually the conception of this Lu grows upon the mind—the destroyer of the sons of Turann—the implacably filial—the expulsor of the Fomoroh—the ...
— Early Bardic Literature, Ireland • Standish O'Grady
... last, every phenomenon and every law is linked immediately to some act or some command of God. It is God who creates, God who commands, God who names, God who approves, and God who blesses. Strike out the allusions to God, and the narrative is meaningless. Clearly it was never intended to teach science. It has obviously one purpose, to reveal and keep before the minds of men the grand truth that Jehovah is the sole Creator and Lord of the heavens and the earth; and it leaves the scientific comprehension of nature to the natural ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... to pour it out in a copious stream, without pausing to take breath or hesitating over a word—to be able to do all this is to prove yourself a man, an equal, one to be respected and even made a friend of. What I really wished to say to him was put in a few words at the conclusion of my well-nigh meaningless oration. Everywhere, I said, I had been the Indian's friend, and I wished to be his friend, to live with him at Parahuari, even as I had lived with other chiefs and heads of villages and families; to be looked ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... room, where Harry discovered it; but might—nay, probably would—have been stolen by the wicked man who committed this crime to get possession of it. Again, but for Mr. Goodfellow this written narrative would undoubtedly have been lost to us, and the map, if not meaningless, might have seemed a clue not worth the risk of following. In short, ma'am"—Plinny turned again to Miss Belcher—"I saw that each of us at this table had been wonderfully brought here by the hand of Providence. And from this I went on to see, and with wonder and thankfulness, ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... sat in helpless anger, trying to formulate something intelligible, the curtain parted, and a sallow little Eurasian girl of eighteen, also in the dress of the Army, came through from the bedroom part. She smiled in a conscious, meaningless way, as she sidled past them. At the door her smile broadened, and as she closed it after her she ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... reforms, the careers of nations.... A bachelor hotel; a club whose windows looked out on the avenue; an office where Carington and he had pretended to work down on Nassau Street; drawing-rooms where Carington and he had pretended to be in love, on various streets; the whole gay, meaningless panorama of his life as a homeless, unplaced New York sojourner, who had considered that he had too much money to be anything seriously and too little money to do anything effectively.... Then another picture, jerking, ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... of companionship through which many may be led from a sense of isolation to one of civic responsibility, even as another type of club provides recreational facilities for those who have had only meaningless excitements, or, as a third type, opens new and interesting vistas of life ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... This meaningless speech had a remarkable effect on Munger. He stared first at one prefect, then at the other; and when Barnworth rose as if to leave the room, ...
— The Master of the Shell • Talbot Baines Reed
... blighting thought in his soul that the faith is a lie, and the hope no more than the folly of the crowd; to read hundreds of times in a twelvemonth with solemn unction as the inspired word of the Supreme what to him are meaningless as the Abracadabras of the conjuror in a booth; to go on to the end of his days administering to simple folk holy rites of commemoration and solace, when he has in his mind at each phrase what dupes are those simple folk ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... had thought such things as these so very funny that he could not possibly help laughing; how silly and meaningless—yes, and cruel—did they seem to him now! Oh, Satan was struggling for Tip to-day: he was reaping the fruits of long weeks spent in ...
— Tip Lewis and His Lamp • Pansy (aka Isabella Alden)
... than (when it is not merely tedious), the reading of offered correspondence. There is the pure lunatic, such as the man who for years sends despatches in a sort of cuneiform cipher, probably quite meaningless and certainly not likely to meet with a decipherer; there is the abusive person who (less piquantly than Reade in the letter quoted above) gives his opinion of your paper; the volunteer-corrector of obvious misprints; the innocent ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... come again to the fight. We believe in liberty in the highest degree, such liberty as our fathers fought for, and this struggle will go on until that liberty is gained; liberty is the pursuit of life, health, and happiness. We look in vain for honesty in political life. We turn in disgust from the meaningless platitudes of the Republican Convention at Worcester, from the incidental admission of a plank in ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... violated in the establishment of branch banks; "persons who were never held in bondage and their descendants" were allowed to deposit funds in the bank; money was loaned upon valueless securities and meaningless collaterals, and in the fall of 1873, having been kept open for a long time on money borrowed on collateral securities belonging to its customers, ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... into his shrivelled dissipated face; quitting the interchange of wit, the society of the Townshends, the Walpoles, the Williamses, the Edgecumbes; all the jovial, keen wisdom of Gilly, and Dick, and Horace, and Charles, as they called one another, for the meaningless prattle, the merry laughter of this half-English, half-Italian child, It redeems Selwyn in our eyes, and it may have done him real good: nay, he must have felt a keen refreshment in this change from vice to innocence; and we understand the misery he expressed, when the ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... the same supernally sweet, silver bell tones of—yesterday, I must call it, although in that place of eternal day the term is meaningless—bade us enter. The door slipped aside. The chamber was small, the opal walls screening it on three sides, the black opacity covering it, the fourth side opening out into a delicious little walled garden—a mass of the fragrant, luminous ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... I'm not the incarnation of all the virtues you imagined me to be!" Olive sat down and played nervously with a penholder, jabbing meaningless lines and dots on to a ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... caring to waste any of his precious time, I suppose, but he observed, when I spoke of it, that the 'ignorant animals liked the taste of snow.' I went back to the bench again and looked at his fret-work. Goodness only knows why he was doing it. It was a meaningless design of dots and wriggles. When I asked him he said he was doing it for a Christmas present for his mother in Pernambuco. He added that she was a Maltese and he had learned Italian from her. I was so oppressed by this amazing knowledge of languages that I couldn't say a word in any language. ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... the slit between the vocal ligaments, yet the appellations "Rima glottidis" and "Aperture of the glottis" are also employed for the same thing. Medical men, moreover, speak of "Spasm of the glottis," and singing masters of the "Shock of the glottis," which terms are clearly quite meaningless when applied to ...
— The Mechanism of the Human Voice • Emil Behnke
... He was a typical Deist, thinking that the God who had made the myriad stars of the firmament and who had promulgated eternal laws for the universe, would hardly concern Himself with the soul of Pierre or Jean. To him all priests were impostors, and sacraments meaningless mummery, and yet he would not abolish religion entirely. Voltaire often said that he believed in a "natural religion," but never explained it fully. Indeed, he was far more interested in tearing down than in building up, and disposed rather to scoff at ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... heard at school or from the Parson—who had long perturbed himself as to the right moment for explanations—had started those first warning notes, but words freely bandied across his head at home as a little boy, and then meaningless to him—words that had since echoed back on to fuller knowledge ominously. If it had not been that Archelaus, the free-speaker and the vindictive One of the family, was still in Australia, and that Ishmael spent a large part of his ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... where the sledge dogs stood harnessed. Hatless, silent, crowding back their grief behind grim and lonely countenances, they waited for Cummins' wife to say good-bye. The woman did not speak. She held up her child for each man to kiss, and the baby babbled meaningless things into the bearded faces that it had come to know and love, and when it came to Williams' turn he whispered, "Be a good baby, be a good baby." And when it was all over the woman crushed the child to her breast and dropped sobbing upon the sledge, and Jan cracked his whip and shouted hoarsely ...
— Back to God's Country and Other Stories • James Oliver Curwood
... source of pleasure, far removed from any thought or aspiration to create new life and care for it; the pursuit of money for the pleasure of gain, and the pleasure of out-witting others, and the gratification of vanities and luxuries, far removed from essential needs; meaningless distractions and entertainments, which tickle the wit and nerves of the material senses, but by which neither the heart feelings, nor the soul feelings, nor even the deeper esthetic feelings, are stirred or stimulated; jazz music, bright colors, lively ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... overlooked by the white mountains, and encompassed nearer hand by woods, lay bare to the strong radiance of the moon. Rough goods, such as make the wealth of foresters, were sprinkled here and there upon the ground in meaningless disarray. About the midst, a tent stood, silvered with frost: the door open, gaping on the black interior. At the one end of this small stage lay what seemed the tattered remnants of a man. Without doubt we had arrived upon the scene of Harris's encampment; there were the goods ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... gain fails to appear. Again, if they ever forget what they read, they'll be worried. Those who /can/ forget—those with fresh eyes who have swept from their minds such facts as the exact month and day that their children were born, or the numbers on houses, or the names (the mere meaningless labels) of the people they meet,—will be urged to go live in sanitariums ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day Jr.
... for those who do not look for him. Till they do, all he can do is to make them feel the want of him. Barbara had not begun to seek him. She did not know there was anybody to seek: she only missed him without knowing what she missed. The blind, almost meaningless reverence for the name of God, which somehow she learned at church, had not led her in any way to associate him with her sense of ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... for this home of freedom, there are those who would unhesitatingly call it The Fourth Dimension of Space. For such readers as may be ignorant of the amazing content of this seemingly meaningless phrase, any summary attempt at enlightenment will lead only to deeper mystification. To the question, where and what is the fourth dimension, the answer must be, it is here—in us, and all about us—in a direction toward which we can ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... her head, "Miseratrix virginum Regina nostri miserere," and greeted me with a pitiless simper. The unidentified martyr on the left stared straight in front of him with callous indifference, and St. Roch looked aggravatingly plump for all his ostentatious plague-spot. The picture was worse than meaningless. It was insulting. It drove me out of the Public Gallery. Outside a grey mist veiled the hills and a fine penetrating rain was falling. I crept home, and for the fiftieth time since I have been here, opened my "History of Renaissance Morals." ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... and merry, and do their duty as faithfully as any Christian, yet to them Heaven and Hell are meaningless abstractions; God and the soul are problems they, with quiet cheerfulness, ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... trouble of acquiring it. Of woman as a real human being, with sexual needs and sexual responsibilities, morality has often known nothing. It has been content to preach restraint to man, an abstract and meaningless restraint even if it were possible. But when we have regard to the actual facts of life, we can no longer place virtue in a vacuum. Women are just as apt as men to be afflicted by the petty jealousies and narrownesses of the crude sexual ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... returned to find her married, and severed from him forever, at least in this life. When he found that he had lost her he began to understand how dear she was. All life stood before him aimless, pointless, and meaningless without her. He came back, but the old intercourse could not be renewed; she could not be his, and he could only live, and love, and endure. Perhaps it would have been wiser if he had at once left Holby ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... brick-kilns, squat truncations, Hunched like spread toads yet high beneath their circles Of low packed smoke, assemblages of thunder That glowed upon their under sides by night And lit like storm small shadowless workmen's toil. Meaningless stumps, upturned bare roots, remained In fields of mashy mud and trampled leaves; While, if a horse died hauling, plasterers Knelt on a flank to ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... the Grand Canyon, the volcanic gulf of Crater Lake, the bristling granite core of the Rockies, and the ancient ice-carved shales of Glacier National Park all are one—just scenery, magnificent, incomparable, meaningless. As a people we have been content to wonder, not to know; yet with scenery, as with all else, to know is to begin fully to enjoy. Appreciation measures enjoyment. And this brings me to my proposition, namely, that we shall not really enjoy our possession of the grandest scenery ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... sounded hopelessly on the sidewalk as he dashed up toward Broadway, but behind came the sound of others in pursuit, and the shouting was becoming a meaningless babble as others took it up. There was no longer any doubt. Someone was certainly after him—there'd been no time to turn in an alarm over the fire in his apartment. They'd been coming for him before ...
— Pursuit • Lester del Rey
... "Thank you," he answered. "Thank you, very much. I shall be very glad." His tone had the meaningless quality of perfunctory courtesy; Miss Briscoe detected only the courtesy; but the strange lady marked the lack of intention ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... some clear reason to the contrary, avoid the use of expressions that have been used so much that they are worn out and often almost meaningless. Such expressions as the following ones are not wrong, but are often used when they are both inappropriate ...
— Practical Grammar and Composition • Thomas Wood
... whispering soul that seems To haunt the wind; the rainbow light that streams, Like some wild spirit, 'thwart the cataract's leap— Are glimmerings of thee and thy loveliness, Pervading all my world; interpreting The marvel and the wonder these disclose: For, lacking thee, to me were meaningless Life, love and hope, the joy of every thing, And all the beauty that ...
— Weeds by the Wall - Verses • Madison J. Cawein
... I may notice more particularly Lloyd's, Southey's, Dermody's Sonnets. I shrink from them now: my teazing lot makes me too confused for a clear judgment of things, too selfish for sympathy; and these ill-digested, meaningless remarks I have imposed on myself as a task, to lull reflection, as well as to show you I did not neglect reading your valuable present. Return my acknowledgments to Lloyd; you two appear to be about realising an Elysium upon earth, and, no doubt, I shall be happier. ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... greater part of the morning with the new heiress, and Lydia had listened, speechless, as he recited a long and meaningless list of securities, of estates, of ground rents, balances and the ...
— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace
... e! are merely meaningless exclamatory sounds, such as we have in civilised songs. Sivu is the name of a Fuyuge community close to the Mission Station, being, in fact, the one referred to by me in my chapter on communities. Mambule is the name of another of these communities, further away from the station, ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson
... to Rowena—the first he felt sure would accept with enthusiasm; the latter he feared would politely refuse; but Rowena smiled again, her set meaningless little smile, and allowed a subdued murmur of thanks to mingle with Dreda's rhapsodies. It was cleverly done, for without being in any way committed she had escaped drawing attention upon herself ...
— Etheldreda the Ready - A School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... advance of those of his party that he was obliged, for reasons of political expediency and party exigency, to hold them in abeyance during the Presidential campaign of 1908. Jeffersonian democracy, therefore, seems now to be nothing more than a meaningless form ...
— The Facts of Reconstruction • John R. Lynch
... would be none the less [wrongful] hurtful to us for being called unofficial, and it might be even more injurious, because we should have no means of knowing what points might be resolved by it. Moreover, unofficial intercourse is useless and meaningless if it is not expected to ripen into official intercourse and direct recognition. It is left doubtful here whether the proposed unofficial intercourse has yet actually begun. Your own [present] antecedent instructions are deemed explicit enough, and it is hoped ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... although I could not make out the expressions of their faces, in the gloom, yet I doubted not but that they were puzzled ones at that lengthy and apparently meaningless harangue. ...
— The Suitors of Yvonne • Raphael Sabatini
... reading it through for the second time. She may, by pure accident, have left it on her favourite seat beneath the window. The knowledge that insincerity is our universal garment has reduced all compliment to meaningless formula. A lady one evening at a party drew me aside. The chief ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... like to make it clear that it is not the reporters but the owners of the papers that should be censured. With the exception of a few garrulous and gushing geese, who think it smart to ask pert and meaningless questions, the male reporters that I have met have not only been serious and intelligent, but men with whom I have discussed literature, politics and religion; but it would not pay their editors, I presume, to publish ...
— My Impresssions of America • Margot Asquith
... all, Parisian. To a person who knew nothing of Paris, who had never been in Paris, and who was not somewhat au fait with the gay and triste, the splendid and squalid, the brilliant and unequal society there, these sketches would be meaningless. Again, Gavarni's pictures are not series. He does not develop his heroes and heroines. He does not make us feel for them in their mishaps. We do not laugh with them, as we would with friends or acquaintances, but we laugh at them. We do not ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... the Republic as the veterans, the survivors of those who saved the Union. They did the one deed which if left undone would have meant that all else in our history went for nothing. But for their steadfast prowess in the greatest crisis of our history, all our annals would be meaningless, and our great experiment in popular freedom and self-government a gloomy failure. Moreover, they not only left us a united Nation, but they left us also as a heritage the memory of the mighty deeds by which the Nation was kept ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... the soul of business. 'Not at all,' I answered. 'I am an automaton—nothing more. It is a typewriter's function to transcribe the words a client dictates as if they were absolutely meaningless to her.' ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... they have not been able to come to an agreement as to what portion of the papers should be published, although both Governments have long since promised publication. The words used in the House of Commons by Sir Edward Grey were altered by the French Government into meaningless words, and the words actually used excluded by Governmental action ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... Waggoner's voice tailed off into a meaningless drone that became merged with the creaking of the wheels, the plodding hoof-strokes of the horses, and Bellew ...
— The Money Moon - A Romance • Jeffery Farnol
... Next come Virtue and Vice, and, in a dead and perfunctory echo of Plato's Republic, an enumeration of the good and bad forms of human society. The questions which vibrated with life in free Athens had become meaningless to a despot-governed world. Then follows ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... preacher and prophet. Writing in the midst of the turmoil of war, I am vividly conscious of having had my mind prepared for it by the material I have here so inadequately described. All the misunderstandings, the weaknesses, the noisy, meaningless ambitions, the tepid acceptance of traditional standards, have been exposed by Mr Wells in these fantasies of his. And in The War in the Air, with just such exaggerations as are necessary for a fiction of this kind, ...
— H. G. Wells • J. D. Beresford
... these men, comrades in the socialist revolution. Nor is the word empty and meaningless, coined of mere lip service. It knits men together as brothers, as men should be knit together who stand shoulder to shoulder under the red banner of revolt. This red banner, by the way, symbolizes the brotherhood of man, and does not symbolize the incendiarism ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... picturesque, so full of natural imagery, that it appeals to every age, and speaks in every language of the world. If its descriptions of character had been given in the language of the philosopher or academist, what was intelligible to one age would have been perplexing or meaningless to the next. Remember that the long gallery in the Pyramids, which was directed to the pole-star when they were constructed, is now hopelessly out of course, because the position of the pole-star, in relation to the ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... the time being within an hour of curfew—which, to be exact, is rung in Hathelsborough every night, all the year round, sixty minutes after sunset, despite the fact that it is nowadays but a meaningless if time-honoured ceremony—Bunning, caretaker and custodian of the Moot Hall, stood without its gates, smoking his pipe and looking around him. He was an ex-Army man, Bunning, who had seen service ...
— In the Mayor's Parlour • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... could not rest with the Gypsies. I must be alone. Soon I left the camp and returned to London, where I took a suite of rooms in a house not far from Eaton Square—though to me London was a huge meaningless maze of houses clustered around Primrose Court—that horrid, fascinating, intolerable core of pain. Into my lungs poured the hateful atmosphere of the city where Winifred had perished; poured hot and stifling as sand-blasts of ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... is the basis of all religious belief. If there is no God, there is no moral obligation. If there is no Almighty Being to whom men owe existence, and to whom they must give account, worship is a vain show and systems of religion are meaningless. Theologians, therefore, from the days of the first Christian apologists to our own time, have endeavoured to establish by proof the doctrine of the Divine existence. To those who accept the authority of Scripture the existence of God ...
— Exposition of the Apostles Creed • James Dodds
... its setting, as it is often witnessed to-day, the tea ceremony seems meaningless and wearisome, an affected simplicity of the idle. But as a guest of this old house of fine timbers weathered to silver-grey I found the secret of Cha-no-yu. This flower of Far Eastern civilisation is an aesthetic expression of true good-fellowship, and a gentle simplicity and ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... ancient law of England, those who had a certain amount of land must become knights; but since the decay of the feudal system, landowners had given up the meaningless form of qualifying themselves as knights. It now occurred to the king's government that a large amount of money might be raised by fining these delinquents. Other unfortunates who had settled within the boundaries of the royal forests were either heavily ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... there is a Beyond, and he who has once caught a glance of it, is like a man who has gazed at the sun—wherever he looks, everywhere he sees the image of the sun. Speak to him of finite things, and he will tell you that the Finite is impossible and meaningless without the Infinite. Speak to him of death, and he will call it birth; speak to him of time, and he will call it the mere shadow of eternity. To us the senses seem to be the organs, the tools, the most powerful engines of knowledge; to him ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... tentatively. Mr. Grimm read them over slowly, the while Monsieur Rigolot sat nervously staring at him. They, too, seemed meaningless as bearing on the matter in hand. Finally, Mr. Grimm nodded, ...
— Elusive Isabel • Jacques Futrelle
... observing the relationship of the plants and animals of each island in the Galapagos group to those of the other islands and of South America, the nearest continent. These facts suggested evolution, and without evolution appeared to be meaningless. ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... serious. Not a smile is provided for in the whole list. There is no element of mystery about them. The passions and sentiments illustrated are of the universal kind. And just as vague, uncanny and bizarre feelings play no part, so there is no resort to verbal tricks, such as meaningless repetitions, or onomatopoetic jingles. The language is dignified and classical. Their great merit is the vivid and strong imaginative coloring with which situations and actions are portrayed. While in ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas |
