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More "Nothingness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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
... bright day, Jim landed at a little way station from which a single-gauge track ran off into apparent nothingness. Puffing on the single-gauge track was a "dinky" engine, coupled to a flat car. Wooden benches were fastened along one end of the car. The engineer and fireman were loading sheet iron on the other end. They looked Jim over as he ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... felt in my left-hand coat-pocket—'I had better be getting ready.' I felt in my right-hand coat-pocket. 'Ready,' I repeated blankly. A clammy coldness took possession of me. My voice trailed off into nothingness. For in neither pocket was There a single one of the shells with which I had fancied that I was abundantly provided. In moments of excitement man is apt to make mistakes. I had made mine when, starting out on the sortie, I had left all my ammunition ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... for the highest and purest thought. To have known a great and exalted love and have it fade from your grasp and flee as shadow, living only in memory, is the highest good, he wrote. A great sorrow at one stroke purchases a redemption from all petty troubles; it sinks all trivial annoyances into nothingness, and grants the man lifelong freedom from all petty, corroding cares. His feelings have been sounded to their depths—the plummet has touched bottom. Fate has done her worst: she has brought him face to face with the Supreme Calamity, and thereafter there is nothing ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... truth—that God lives, God our Father—conscious of Himself and of us—a person in a very real sense—from Whom we derive personality—from Whom we came—and to Whom we go. If mankind loses that, "his arms do clasp the air" and he drowns in the infinity of time and space and his own nothingness. We have from Christ the truth and somehow we must learn it with a new understanding—or rather with the new understanding that modern science and modern reverent scientific thought have given ...
— Frank H. Nelson of Cincinnati • Warren C. Herrick
... McLaurin of Tuckapo Valley. In the mid-part of the eighteenth century, when that valley was a wild forest, her great-grandfather, Angus McLaurin, came out of the air, out of the nothingness of a hiatus in our genealogy, and settled along the banks of the Juniata. His worldly goods were strapped on the back of a cow; his sole companion was his wife; his sole defence his rifle. To the dusky citizens of the valley he seemed a harmless person, and they sold ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... light, a darkness that may be felt. Torano, that little town you come upon at the very threshold of the quarries, is like a town of the Middle Age, full of stones and refuse and narrow ways that end in a blind nothingness, and low houses without glass in the windows, and dogs and cats and animals of all sorts, goats and chickens and pigs, among which the people live. Thus busy with the frightful labour among the stones in the heart of the mountains, ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... not see her in the other life, my poor imagination would shrink from the idea of perfect bliss, which I would fain promise myself in it."[237] To pluck so gracious a flower of hope on the edge of the sombre unechoing gulf of nothingness into which our friend has slid silently down, is a natural impulse of the sensitive soul, numbing remorse and giving a moment's relief to the hunger and thirst of a tenderness that has been robbed of its object. Yet would not men be more likely to have a deeper love for those about them, and a keener ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... doorway to get the afternoon air. Women and children straggled rarely through the streets. The Boche had left the little town alone for some time; they had other things to do with their heavy guns; and all the French population, save those whose homes were reduced to nothingness, had remained. They took no notice of the distant bombardment. It had grown to be a phenomenon of nature like ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... calms, riding at our moorings, much we discussed eternity and creation. Doctrines once terrible seemed now harmless and without menace, dogmas dissolved into thinnest air, blown to the nothingness from whence they came; for, strangely, all teachings and creeds and laws of faith narrowed to the oldest of precepts; and, ponder and question as we might, citing prophet and saint and holy men inspired, all came to the same at last, expressed in that ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... stood erect and empty, though Nancy Wentworth had filled them every Sunday since any one could remember. This instance, though felt at the time to be of mysterious significance if the cause were ever revealed, paled into nothingness when, after the ringing of the last bell, Nancy Wentworth walked up the aisle on Justin Peabody's arm, and they took their seats side by side in ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... LETTER BETA}) The theory under consideration is inadmissible also from the philosophical point of view. A quality does not "flow" or tend to revert to nothingness. On the contrary, its very nature demands that it remain constant until destroyed by its opposite or by some positive cause. It is impossible to conceive a quality that would of itself revert to nothingness without the intervention of a destructive cause. ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... 'tis well, Were thy last hour to come, This moment had been it; [1] yet by thy shroud I'll pull thee backward, squeeze thee to a bladder, Till thou dost groan thy nothingness away. Thou fly'st! 'Tis well. [Ghost retires. [2] I thought what was the courage of a ghost! Yet, dare not, on thy life—Why say I that, Since life thou hast not?—Dare not walk again Within these walls, on pain of the Red Sea. For, if henceforth I ever find thee here, ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... evening and all nature seemed full of beauty and peace. It can easily be imagined what this drive meant, then, to a fine, sensitive young woman, whose every instinct of youth and freedom and life had been crushed into undeveloped nothingness by years of gray convention in ...
— The Point of View • Elinor Glyn
... to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness. I did not know that I knew aught, or that I lived or acted or desired. I had neither will nor intellect. I was carried along to objects and acts by a certain blind natural impetus. I had a mind which caused me to feel anger, satisfaction, desire. These two facts led those about ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... moment; finally, that the identification of contradictories, so far from being the self-developing process which Hegel supposes, is really a self-consuming process, passing from the less to the more abstract, and terminating either in a laugh at the ultimate nothingness, or in a mood of vertiginous amazement at a ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... might be wondered that the whole body did not perish by faction. After the party had passed the boundary line of Persimmon Sneed's tract, where he seemed to consider the right of eminent domain merged in nothingness in comparison to his lordly prerogatives as owner in fee simple, he ceased to urge as heretofore. He dictated boldly to the jury. He rode briskly on in advance, as if doing the honors of his estate to flattered guests, now and again ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... longer to deal with Death, but with Life. We no longer believe either in the nothingness of the tomb or in salvation purchased by obligatory renunciation; we want life to be good because we want it to be fruitful. Lazarus must leave his dunghill, so that the poor may no longer rejoice at the death of the rich. All must be happy, so ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... wanted the old Wilkie Collins idea of a plot with a hundred threads drawn into one woof, or did he prefer modern nothingness, a shred of a story attached to unending analysis and the infinitely little commented upon with elaborate and pretentious ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... brought no shock, I even dimly wondered that any other condition ever existed. Verily, men are happier for a gentle frenzy. Then, indeed, are all things leveled, all barriers removed. Gone were all my pigmy troubles, vanished into nothingness. Engulfed in a common ruin lay all fragments of desire; the search for reward, the dread of punishment—all petty figments of the imagination were powerful now no more. The fall of reason crushed every human hope and dulled the edge of every human fear. ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... come, Priscilla, if there be aught to see," continued she, throwing down the stocking which she was knitting for her father. "Truly my eyes ache with staring at nothingness." ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... the surface. But others sprang up and leaped over them in serried ranks. They lay flat on the water and rushed toward the land. The storm whipped the white foam out of their mouths and drove it along the beach, where it hung gleaming on the bushes, and then vanished into nothingness. Right up to the shore they dashed, and then fell dead. But fresh hordes stormed shoreward from the offing, as though the land must be over-run by them; they reared, foaming, and struck at one another; they sprang, snorting and quivering, high in the air; they broke asunder in panic; there was ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... moon's tender light showed faces wild and fierce, that came and went, now here—now there; it glinted on head-piece and ringed mail, and flashed back from whirling steel—a round, placid moon that seemed, all at once, to burst asunder and vanish, smitten into nothingness. He was down—beaten to his knee, deafened and half blind, but struggling to his feet he staggered out from the friendly shadow of the trees, out into the open. A sword, hard-driven, bent and snapped short upon his triple mail, the blow of a gisarm half stunned him, a goring pike-thrust ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... vision this than any he had had in the old days of Marjorie. He smiled at the thought of those dreams, so utterly broken and dead and wafted away into the nothingness of ...
— The Imaginary Marriage • Henry St. John Cooper
... to the Cathedral of the Sacred Thorn in Cameliard. All night Jurgen prayed there, not in repentance, but in terror. For his dead he prayed, that they should not have been blotted out in nothingness, for the dead among his kindred whom he had loved in boyhood, and for these only. About the men and women whom he had known since then he did not seem to care, or not at least so vitally. But he put up a sort of prayer for Dame Lisa—"wherever my dear wife may be, and, ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... but his bones and a small heap of dried cases, from which the flies have emerged when the time arrived for them to change from the form of maggots. The sight of the largest of the animal creation being thus reduced from life to nothingness within so short a space of time is an instance of the perishable tenure of mortality which cannot fail to strike the most unthinking. The majesty, the power, and the sagacity of the enormous beast are scattered in the myriads of flies which ...
— The Rifle and The Hound in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... Art!" thus mused the enthusiastic painter, as he trod the street. "Thou art the image of the Creator's own. The innumerable forms, that wander in nothingness, start into being at thy beck. The dead live again. Thou recallest them to their old scenes, and givest their gray shadows the lustre of a better life, at once earthly and immortal. Thou snatchest back the fleeting moments of History. With ...
— The Prophetic Pictures (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... by Newton, when he solved the problem of the world, and revealed the wonderful art displayed therein by the Supreme Architect. Never before, in the history of the human race, was so impressive a conviction made of the almost absolute nothingness of man, when measured on the inconceivably magnificent scale of the universe. No one, it is well known, felt this conviction more deeply than Newton himself. "I have been but as a child," said he, "playing ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... noise broke out as Sir Francis Drake stood up. The crowd was one open mouth, shouting, the church bells burst into peals overhead, answered by the roll of drums from the deck and the blare of trumpets; and then the whole din sank into nothingness for a moment under the heart-shaking crash of the ship's broadside, echoed instantly by the deeper roar of the dockyard guns, and answered after a moment or two from far away by the dull boom from the Tower. And Anthony leaned yet further from the window ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... in that of nature. The sound sun, or the figures s, u, n, are purely arbitrary modes of recalling the object, and for visual mere objects they are not only sufficient, but have infinite advantages from their very nothingness per se. But the language of nature is a subordinate Logos, that was in the beginning, and was with the thing it represented, and was the ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... Nirwn* round our life with nothingness, tis haply best; Thy toils and troubles, want and woe at length ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... in. 'I was going to say that they now—my parents, I mean—are absorbed and don't trouble themselves about their own nothingness; it doesn't sicken them ... while I ... I feel nothing but ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... night flash out the beams of day, So out of darkness dawns a light, a king, On you, on Argos—Agamemnon comes. Then hail and greet him well! such meed befits Him whose right hand hewed down the towers of Troy With the great axe of Zeus who righteth wrong— And smote the plain, smote down to nothingness Each altar, every shrine; and far and wide Dies from the whole land's face ...
— The House of Atreus • AEschylus
... of these tombs that are my palace halls? If thou wilt, I can lead thee to where Tisno, the mightiest and most valorous King of Kor, in whose day these caves were ended, lies in a pomp that seems to mock at nothingness, and bid the empty shadows of the past do homage ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... fat King Louis XVI, the hapless royal family, and the whole supporting system of parasitic aristocracy, were hurled down into black nothingness! The upset released our characters from the horrors of prison immurement, only to plunge them in the more awful ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... if all the agitations of the past instants had been dissipated into nothingness by the jest of such a question. "I swear to you, Henri," she said, softly, "that the man I could love would not be at all like ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... leap? They have taken from me this plaything, but with what have they replaced it?... With new wants, with new wishes, which Allah himself can neither weary nor satisfy. I thought myself a man of consequence; but now I am convinced of my own nothingness. Formerly, to my memory, my grandfather and great-grandfather were at the beginning of the night of the past, with its stories and dreaming traditions.... The Caucasus contained my world, and I peacefully slept in that night. I thought to be famous ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... to vanish as their hurtling flight sent them rocketing on for distances inconceivably vast through a bleak and appalling Nothingness, where ...
— Zehru of Xollar • Hal K. Wells
... and cliffs, to which men could flee for hiding; and the danger of rebellion was less dominant. At sea, a rebellion was like some beastly struggle in one room, beyond the walls of which was everlasting nothingness. The thing had to be fought out, as it were, man to man within four walls, and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... John cottage, as in nearly all other homes, differences of opinion on minor questions melted into nothingness. ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... merchant wandered through the resident streets of Winesburg blind with anger, brought on by his failure to declare his determination not to be queer. Bitterly the sense of defeat settled upon him and he wanted to weep. After the hours of futile sputtering at nothingness that had occupied the afternoon and his failure in the presence of the young reporter, he thought he could see no hope of ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... to go home, when a shout went up that the span on the other side of the center was going. There could be no doubt that the splintering crash and the grinding swirl of waters and ice were caused by the destruction of that span which dissolved into nothingness almost ...
— The Telegraph Messenger Boy - The Straight Road to Success • Edward S. Ellis
... window again and faced me, and her eyes were glowing with the light of love. Again for the moment we were face to face with the perils that menaced us from the outside, and before that consideration, all else faded to nothingness with Zara. A little while ago she had repudiated me, but all-conquering Love had stepped in again, had overpowered her, enthralled her, and I could see that she was more than ...
— Princess Zara • Ross Beeckman
... strove in vain to read the traces of last night's passion. So that it flashed across me that if this man really stood (and afterwards I knew that he did) on the thin razor-edge between life and death, between the supreme of earthly power, lord of France and arbiter of Europe, and the nothingness of the clod, he justified his fame. He gave weaker natures no ...
— Under the Red Robe • Stanley Weyman
... not deceive me. I did not think for a moment that Charles meant to give his daughter to Max. But it answered my purpose by bringing Max to a realization of the nothingness of life in Styria, and opening his eyes to the glorious possibilities that lay in the great ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major
... held back the secret in his situation? Would you or I? Doubtful, if when smitten with love for a fair, sweet girl, we had felt that its telling would have riveted the bonds which, at the most, were only partly formed, and might dissolve into nothingness ...
— Brave Tom - The Battle That Won • Edward S. Ellis
... loudest of prints, the figures of which turned her into a huge flower bed of brilliant cabbage-like blooms. Over this chaos of colours peered her round little face with its snapping eyes. She discoursed in sentences which began coherently, but frayed out soon into nothingness under the stress of inner thought. "I don't see where that husban' of mine is. I reckon you'll think we're just awful rude, Mr. de Laney, and that gal, an' Maude. I declare it's jest enough to try any one's patience, it surely is. You've no idea, Mr. de Laney, what with the hens ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... met Lord Minster, and they passed with a gesture of recognition so infinitesimally small that it almost faded into the nothingness of a "cut." So far as he could condescend to notice so low a thing at all, his lordship had conceived a ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... years. Our clever Wilhelmina at Baireuth, though readers have forgotten the small circumstance, had married a superfluous Sister-in-law of hers to this Karl Edward; and, they say, it was some fond hope of progeny, suddenly dashed into nothingness, that finished the poor man, that night of May 25th. In any case, his Territory falls to Prussia, by Reich's Settlement of long standing (1683-1694); which had been confirmed anew to the late King, Friedrich ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... is a joy forever; Its loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness; but will keep A bower quiet for us, and a sleep Full of sweet dreams and health ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... And when I feel, fair creature of an hour, That I shall never look upon thee more, Never have relish in the faery power Of unreflecting love;—then on the shore Of the wide world I stand alone, and think Till love and fame to nothingness do sink. ...
— The Hundred Best English Poems • Various
... done, no less than the meanest of their subjects.' To which her Majesty replied, 'I know it well ( Je le sais bien ).'—I went on to say to her, 'Madam, your Majesty must also recognize in this hour the vanity and nothingness of the things here below, for which, it may be, you have had too much interest; and the importance of the things of Heaven, which perhaps you have neglected and contemned.' Thereupon the Queen answered, 'True ( Cela est vrai )!' 'Nevertheless, ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle
... nonsense, and said to them: "You blockheads! I am a poor goldsmith, who serve whoever pays me; and you are jeering me as though I were a party-leader. However, this shall not make me cast in your teeth the insatiable greediness, idiotcy, and good-for-nothingness of your predecessors. But this one answer I will make to all your silly railleries; that before two or three days at the longest have passed by, you will have another duke, much worse perhaps than he who now has left ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... indeed risen to the chief place in my thoughts, though my mind still failed to identify her thoroughly. I had thought that I loved her, but I had not. It was the Lady of the Ice whom I loved; and, when Marion had revealed herself, then all was plain. After that revelation Nora sank into nothingness, and Marion ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... with our own vileness, be sensible of our misery, and annihilate ourselves, because the Divine Majesty only communicates itself to the humble. But St. Francis proposed to himself to explain that, when it pleases God to manifest Himself in some manner to a soul which is duly sensible of its nothingness, it is better impressed with its own nothingness, by the disproportion it sees between the Sovereign Being and His creature, which discovers to it a thousand imperfections which it was not previously aware of, as ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... forever for this place and had just found it, and it answered, to the full, a queer mood of silence in his own heart. The wind had died down now. The last wail of a coyote—disconsolate on a far-away ridge—had trembled away into nothingness; the voices of the Little People who had chirped and rustled in the tree aisles during the daylight hours were stilled with a breathless, dramatic stillness. Such sound as remained over the interminable breadth of that dark forest was only the ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... might be expected, She didn't for bric-a-brac care, So she traded the lamp For an Ecuador stamp That somebody told her was rare! This act served to madden The mind of Aladdin, But, 'spite of his impotent wrath, His manor-house vanished, To nothingness banished, And while he ...
— Grimm Tales Made Gay • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... to you wisdom. Bring all the poverty of your natures, all the insufficiency of your religious character, all the inadequacy of your poor work, to your Lord. Feel it all. Let the conviction of your nothingness sink into your soul. Then wait before Him in simple faith, in lowly obedience, and power will come to you equal to your desire and to your duties, and He will put His spirit upon you, and will anoint you to proclaim liberty to the captives and to give bread to all the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... point has continuity, and everything which has continuity is infinitely divisible; but the mathematical point is indivisible because it is not a quantity. Every continuous quantity is mentally infinitely divisible. Among the magnitude of things which are among us, the chief of all is nothingness; and its function extends to matter that does not exist, and its essence is in time in the past or in the future, and it has nothing of the present. This nothingness has its part equal to the whole and the whole to the part, and the divisible to the indivisible, ...
— Thoughts on Art and Life • Leonardo da Vinci
... of the nothingness of life, with its extremes, monstrous and profitless, is often found in the work of Tchekoff. His story "The Kiss" is but a variation of this theme,—the absurdity of life. Lieutenant Riabovich, under the influence of a chance kiss, a kiss that was not meant for him, dreams ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... nothingness becomes too great to bear, it becomes necessary to escape; a man under great enough pressure will take the easy way out. But if there is no easy way? Why, then a man must ...
— Suite Mentale • Gordon Randall Garrett
... years of craving for a pickle I began to see them in all sorts and sizes, dripping with delicious vinegar and aromatic of tasty cloves and cinnamon. There was no way for me to reach them. When I tired of trying I would drop into nothingness again. By-and-by these lapses seemed to give me strength. The floating pickles grew smaller and faded away and I began to discern the dim outline of pillows, bed-clothes and bed-posts, and the ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... a trying moment for Tad Butler, down there alone in the branches of the pinyon tree, with fifty feet of nothingness beneath him and a sheer wall that extended an equal distance ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in the Rockies • Frank Gee Patchin
... were we all; and some malignant God Beguiled us; for the one great war-defence Left us, since Aeacus' son in battle fell, Was Aias' mighty strength. And now the Gods Will to our loss destroy him, bringing bane On thee and me, that all we may fill up The cup of doom, and pass to nothingness." ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... dreaded invaders reached the Krishna River the Hindus to their south, stricken with terror, combined, and gathered in haste to the new standard which alone seemed to offer some hope of protection. The decayed old states crumbled away into nothingness, and the fighting kings of Vijayanagar became the saviours of the south for two ...
— A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagar; A Contribution to the History of India • Robert Sewell
... temperatures and at uniform pressure contracts by 1-27 2d of its own bulk with each successive degree of lowered temperature. If this law held true for all temperatures, the gas would apparently contract to nothingness when the last degree of temperature was reached, or at least to a bulk so insignificant that it would be inappreciable by standards of sense. But it was soon found by the low-temperature experimenters that the law does not hold exactly at extreme temperatures, nor does it ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... wall-like mass of lathering, leaping surges. In front, a vast nothingness, a black, unfathomable void, up through which gushed in clouds the ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... and leaning forward, resting on her hands, stared across the appalling gulf of inky dark, and down into the nothingness. ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... human infirmity, dependence, and emptiness. And so to Jesus of Nazareth, to be born was impoverishment. If there is nothing more in His birth than in the birth of each of us, the words are grotesquely inappropriate to the facts of the case. For as between nothingness, which is the alternative, and the possession of conscious being, there is surely a contrast the very reverse of that expressed here. For us, to be born is to be endowed with capacities, with the wealth of intelligent, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... together in the open doorway of the little house and watched the yacht's lights as they described a great curve through the darkness, then slowly faded into nothingness down the bay. Cherry drew herself ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... have been up late the night before, or had our meals at irregular hours, or whether our spirits have been depressed by being kicked by a drunken hostler. We have only about ten or twelve years in which to enjoy ourselves, and then we go out to be shot into nothingness. Take care of us while you may. Job's horse was "clothed with thunder," but all we ask is a plain blanket. When we are sick, put us in a "horse-pital." Do not strike us when we stumble or scare. Suppose you were ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... widely separated; but a strong kinship exists between them, for all that. I open Professor Aytoun's book, and all this modern life—with its railways, its newspapers, its crowded cities, its Lancashire distresses, its debates in Parliament—fades into nothingness and silence. Scotland, from Edinburgh rock to the Tweed, stretches away in rude spaces of moor and forest. The wind blows across it, unpolluted by the smoke of towns. That which lives now has not yet come into existence; what are to-day crumbling and ivied ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... architect has come to the rescue with his dignified, stately mantel which repels the trivial familiarity of meaningless decoration, and the bookcase whose simple, quiet elegance is in itself decorative. Blessed be the nothingness which allows Miladi to build her own art atmosphere untainted by gifts of ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... of my secretary, my ignorance must have been delightfully amusing to the royal idlers who had little other thought or purpose in life than this very round of complicated nothingness. But if I was a blundering amateur in all this, they were not so much discourteous as envious. They knew that I had won my position by my achievements as a chemist and in a vague way they understood that I had saved the empire from impending ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... doomed to live and die a don if I do; which style of life, next to that of an English bishop, I look on as the most contemptible in the world. The Queen's royal beef-eaters come next; but that, I think, I could endure, as their state of do-nothingness is not so absolute a quantity. Come; how far have you got? Give me the paper, and I'll write you a ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... beautiful the night, through all these hours Of nothingness, with ceaseless music wakes Among the hills, trying the melodies Of myriad chords on the lone, darkened air, With lavish power, self-gladdened, caring nought That there is none to hear. How beautiful! That men should live upon ...
— The Bride of Fort Edward • Delia Bacon
... with it in hand, running our fingers over the big staring letters, as over the black and white keys of a piano, drumming out of them a mild melody of perfect repose. With what delight do we disport us in the illimitable void of its nothingness, as who should swim in air! Here is nothing to startle-nothing to wound. The very atmosphere is saturated with "the spirit of the rural press;" and even our dog stands by, with pendant tail, slowly dropping ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... suggestion, with no hint of heroism, none of heroic action, little even of heroic passion; just death, helpless, hopeless, pointing to nothing but decomposition, decay, disappearance, aneantissement, reduction of the fair frame of life to nothingness. That is the peculiar horror of this war. Were the picture, as it well might be, even more hideous, and did it suggest something more definite, a story of struggle, say, recorded in contortion, or by wounds and weapons, it ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... and supper cooked. Next morning the sun was melting the ice on the hillsides and the frost had converted the wild grapes that hung above them into clusters of pearls. But the beauty of the scene faded into nothingness when they found they had withstood the cold of the night, while the Crow Creek Agency was just on the other side of the river. The journey was resumed in silence and a few miles below, a glimpse of the Stars and Stripes was caught ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... portion of the scorn expressed by the two superior classes for himself, upon the peasants he meets at market: it is a sort of cascade of contempt. At Rome, thanks to the traditions of history, and the education given by the Popes, the inferior thinks he can get out of his nothingness, and become something, by begging the favour and support of a superior. A general system of dependence and patronage makes the plebeian kneel before the man of the middle class, who again kneels before the prince, who in his turn kneels more humbly than all the ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... if they had been. The business of human creatures in this planet is not summed up in the most excellent of priestly catechisms. The world and its concerns continued to interest men, though priests insisted on their nothingness. They could not prevent kings from quarrelling with each other. They could not hinder disputed successions, and civil feuds, and wars, and political conspiracies. What they did do was to shelter the weak from the strong. In the eyes ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... beneath an untempered sun. Shadeless, grassless, it had been an abomination of desolution and a rallying-place for mosquitoes. Then had come the hand of man. First, the Royal Palm Hotel had sprung into stately existence, out of nothingness. Then other caravansaries. Palm and pine and vivid lawn-grass had followed. The mosquitoes had fled far back to the mangrove swamps. And a rarely beautiful White ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... that we are here chiefly concerned. At times no doubt she did really come near to filling and fitting and becoming identical with that figure of the pure philanthropist which was her world-ward face, but for the most part that earnest and dignified figure concealed more or less extensive spaces of nothingness, while the errant soul of the woman within strayed into less ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... horror. It was life that was suffering the last agonies there, amidst that deathlike quiver of the atmosphere, upon those altars which resembled tombs, in that bare vault which looked like a sepulchre. The surroundings all spoke of slaughter and gloom, terror and anguish and nothingness. A faint scent of incense still lingered there, like the last expiring breath of some dead girl, who had been ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... But does not the continual mutation of matter and the universal lot of final dissolution teach us the unessential character of this union, and that it is no intimate fusion? Art, accordingly, in the merely superficial animation of its works, but represents Nothingness ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... filiations and influences, it is still more desirable that each of us should find out some painter whom he can care for individually; and that all of us should find out certain painters who can, almost infallibly, give immense pleasure to all of us; painters who, had they been produced out of nothingness and been followed by nobody, would yet stand in the most important relation in which an artist can be: the relation of being beloved by the whole world, or even by ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... implacable pedagogue, and for the fact his scholars suffer. He wields a rod rather than a filigree bow, as old romancers fabled,—no plaything, but a most business-like article, well-poised in the handle, and thence tapering into graceful, stinging nothingness; and not a scholar escapes at ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... passing breeze. 'How desolate And all forlorn is my unhappy fate. I know not whence I came, or where I go. Scorched by the sun, or chilled by winds that blow, I dwell in space a little time, then pass Out into the night and nothingness—alas!' ...
— Poems of Experience • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... once thrown off and severed from the thinking source, which is the immortality promised by Mr. Frederick Harrison to the select specimens of humanity whose thoughts have any reproductive power. It is not a mere preference of nothingness, or unconscious absorption, to limitation that inspires the intense yearning of the Hindu mind for Nirvana. Even in the Upanishads there are many evidences of a contrary belief, while in the Sankhya the aphorisms of Kapila unmistakably vindicate the individuality of soul (spirit). Individual consciousness ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... competition with his will. When his will is clear, it must be obeyed without hesitation. I am sure that you will assent to this. If religion is any thing, it is every thing. It is, indeed, the one thing needful, in comparison with which every thing else sinks into insignificance, into nothingness. ...
— Advice to a Young Man upon First Going to Oxford - In Ten Letters, From an Uncle to His Nephew • Edward Berens
... case it marks the appearance of a physical factor not evidenced in the milder stages, or else it is the acme of this regression by withdrawal of interest. As has been stated, back of the period of primitive childish ideas there lies a hypothetical state of mental nothingness. If we accept the principle of regression we find historically an analogue to what is apparently the mental state of deep stupor in the earliest phases of infancy. This view receives justification from the study of ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... outside this village a group of men were at work, putting up tents for a hospital. Some thirty miles ahead was the front, and you heard the guns off and on, a low sullen roar, punctuated with hammer-strokes f big fellows. Millions of dollars every hour were being blown to nothingness in that fearful inferno; a gigantic meat-mill that was grinding up the bodies of men and had never ceased day or night for nearly four years. You could be a violent pacifist in sound of those guns, or you could be a violent militarist, but you could not be indifferent to the war, ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... us to-night? What is this sound of wings? Are our eyes opening as fast as night falls? Formerly, we had the sensual lovers' animal dread of nothingness; but to-day, the simplest and richest proof of our love is that the supreme meaning of death to ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... the ends in the glancing water. The bright sun shone overhead; the tendrils and waving grass were gay with blossoms; birds of lovely plumage sang sweetly; and in the distance, on the one hand, fading away into nothingness, were the glorious blue mountains, and away to his right ...
— The Adventures of Don Lavington - Nolens Volens • George Manville Fenn
... mountain cast upon the sea, and then dropped fast asleep, but only to be awakened by a sound like thunder reverberating overhead. It died away and all was silence and darkness again; and then all seemed to be nothingness as he fell into a dreamless sleep, hardly even conscious of whether ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn
... however, mean that perfect bliss is nothingness. Rather is it everything-ness, in that it is all-embracing in its realization. In complete realization of the Cosmos nothing is excluded. Exclusiveness is a concomitant of the state of consciousness pertinent to the personal self, ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... minces along under his enormous mask; Helen or Polyxena would find him too realistically feminine to pass for them; and what shall an invincible Heracles say? Will he not swiftly pound man and mask together into nothingness with his club, for ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... arguments, and yet they have the force of arguments. It is not possible in our better moments to feel that the great and good, by whom this world has been lifted to its present condition, have gone entirely into nothingness. ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... soul. But in the last analysis his verdicts are the immemorial and almost universal ones. Surely his resignationism is not a Slavic copyright; all human philosophies and religions seem doomed to come to it at last. Once it takes shape as the concept of Nirvana, the desire for nothingness, the will to not-will. Again, it is fatalism in this form or that—Mohammedanism, Agnosticism ... Calvinism! Yet again, it is the "Out, out, brief candle!" of Shakespeare, the "Eheu fugaces" of Horace, the "Vanitas vanitatum; omnia ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... all-containing as the earth relapsed into darkness; it glowed like a vast dome of wonderful glass, darkening even as it glowed; and as Percy dropped his eyes once more round the extreme edge of the car the city was but a line and a bubble—a line and a swelling—a line, and nothingness. ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... been so inconsiderate as to fall in love. Yes, he has. And he has fallen in love as absolutely and as idiotically as if he were twenty-one instead of fifty-two. Now, will you kindly tell me how Mr. John Smith is going to fade away into nothingness? And, even if he finds the way to do that, shall he, before fading, pop the question for Mr. Stanley G. Fulton, or shall he trust to Mr. Stanley G. Fulton's being able to win for himself the love Mr. John Smith ...
— Oh, Money! Money! • Eleanor Hodgman Porter
... struggle so hard. Our life that seems to us so short—and so long! A thousand, perhaps ten thousand such, end to end, and we have the life of a world. And what is that? A cycle! A thing self-created, self-destructive: then of human life—nothingness. Oh, it's humorous! Our life, a ten thousandth part of that nothingness; and so full of tiny—great struggles and worries!" She was silent a moment, her throat trembling, a multitude of expressions shifting swiftly ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... work in Bronson's office. He had not come to this collapse without a fierce struggle—but the struggle was inward, and the rolling world was not agitated by it, and rolled calmly on. For of all the "ideals of life" which the world, in its rolling, inconsiderately flattens out to nothingness, the least likely to retain a profile is that ideal which depends upon inheriting money. George Amberson, in spite of his record of failures in business, had spoken shrewdly when he realized at last that money, like life, ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... destiny are laid open before us, black and profound and appalling, as they seem to the young mind when it first attempts to explore them: the obstacles that thwart our faculties and wishes, the deceitfulness of hope, the nothingness of existence, are sketched in the sable colours so natural to the enthusiast when he first ventures upon life, and compares the world that is without him to the anticipations that ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... Deity, and at the same time to show that the monarch was a being of superhuman greatness, these edifices were well adapted to accomplish their purpose. The Egyptian beholder and worshiper was not to be attracted and charmed, but overwhelmed. His own nothingness and the terribleness of the power and the will of God was what he was to feel. But, if the awfulness of Deity was thus inculcated, the divine power of the Pharaoh was not less strikingly set forth. He is seen seated ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... one great fact of a silver mine, had no objection to this theory of the world's future. If it had seemed distasteful for a moment it was because the sudden statement of such vast eventualities dwarfed almost to nothingness the actual matter in hand. He and his plans and all the mineral wealth of the Occidental Province appeared suddenly robbed of every vestige of magnitude. The sensation was disagreeable; but Charles Gould was not dull. Already he felt that he was producing a favourable ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... trailed off into nothingness. There was really no way of telling. All about them was a dreary waste of mud, sand, boulders, smaller stones, gravel and more mud—mud was over everything. And more mud was constantly being made, for the rain had ...
— The Moving Picture Boys at Panama - Stirring Adventures Along the Great Canal • Victor Appleton
... gently and stealthily, and it seemed long before it attained full appreciation; but just as my spirit came at length properly to feel and entertain it, the figures of the judges vanished, as if magically, from before me; the tall candles sank into nothingness; their flames went out utterly; the blackness of darkness supervened; all sensations appeared swallowed up in a mad rushing descent as of the soul into Hades. Then silence, and stillness, night ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... Stackpole as one set over and put apart from his fellows. Neither by daytime nor by nighttime was he thereafter to know darkness. Never again was he to see the twilight fall or face the blackness which comes before the dawning or take his rest in the cloaking, kindly void and nothingness of the midnight. Before the dusk of evening came, in midafternoon sometimes, of stormy and briefened winter days, or in the full radiance of the sun's sinking in the summertime, he was within doors lighting the lights ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... when death has entered and removed the best friend, Fate has done her worst; the plummet has sounded the depths of grief, and thereafter nothing can inspire terror. At one fell stroke all petty annoyances and corroding cares are sunk into nothingness. The memory of a great love lives enshrined in undying amber. It affords a ballast 'gainst all the storms that blow, and although it lends an unutterable sadness, it imparts an unspeakable peace. Where there is this haunting memory of a ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... the Girl collapsed. Limply she slid downward in her chair, one groping hand straying aimlessly to her forehead, then dropping of its own weight. "Quick, Jack,—I'm ill,—git me somethin'!" The voice trailed off to nothingness as the ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... Thou from primeval nothingness didst call, First chaos, then existence. Lord! on Thee Eternity had its foundation; all Sprung forth from Thee:—of light, joy, harmony, Sole origin:—all life, all beauty Thine. Thy word created all, and doth create; Thy splendor fills all ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... has nothing. He is one of the disinherited. Properly speaking, he has no existence at all, or, to be strictly truthful, he had no existence till M. Anatole France's philosophic mind and human sympathy have called him up from his nothingness for our pleasure, and, as the title-page of the book has it, no doubt ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... hush-light, which lasts whilst a man counts twenty, before the silver lances of the sun are flashing through the leaves, and the grey veil which blurs the islands to shapeless blotches in a river of dull silver is burnt to nothingness, and the islands are living things of vivid green set in waters ...
— The Keepers of the King's Peace • Edgar Wallace
... allowing myself to believe in Jack. You seem not to realize that such a belief would—might—stand between me and madness. I've been trying to adjust myself to a possible scheme of living—getting through the years till I go into nothingness. I can't. All I can grasp is the feeling that a man might have if dropped from a balloon and forced to stay gasping in the air, with no place in it, nothing to hold to, no breath to draw, no earth to rest on, no end to hope for. There ...
— The Lifted Bandage • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... though they had never been. The next trio, and the next, rushed up. Again and again came that flash of force, annihilating them. Superbly the tiny gnats that were the American planes plunged headlong at the hovering Leviathan of the air and were whiffed into nothingness. Sixty brave men were dancing motes of cosmic dust before the shocked commander could ...
— When the Sleepers Woke • Arthur Leo Zagat
... behind him, and supports a poor ragged cloth, a purda, I suppose, and behind, are just discernible his wife and child. These wayfarers make me at once think of a new and original treatment for a holy family, but hold! These passages of light and colour, form fading into nothingness, are they not worth understanding alone, are they not more pure art without being nailed to some tale ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... startling thought, doubtless, that periods of time compared with which the life of a man, the existence of a nation, nay, the duration of the human race itself, sink into insignificance, should themselves in turn be dwarfed into nothingness by comparison with periods of a still higher order. But the thought is not more startling than that other thought which we have been compelled to admit—the thought that the earth on which we live, and the solar system to which it belongs, though each so vast that all known material objects are as ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... be a man. One lesson these ancient ruins teach—the nothingness of fame, and that the only things in life worth while are love and duty. I cannot think of any blessing so great to an ardent young American as to learn at the very threshold of his career of activities that duty and affection ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... where to get it, were minor points not worth troubling over. Look at me. Had I not risen, all in one moment, from my nothingness to a height above everything? So shall all things come at my beck and call. I shall get it, get it, get it —there cannot be ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... thin as a saw and crowned on its jagged edge by a rude wooden cross, we stopped for an hour to try the fishing. It was here that I hooked two mysterious creatures, each of which took the fly when it was below the surface, pulled for a few moments in a sullen way and then apparently melted into nothingness. It will always be a source of regret to me that the nature of these fish must remain unknown. While they were on the line it was the general opinion that they were heavy trout; but no sooner had they departed, than I became firmly convinced, ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... past me in the air ... others, while I looked at them, in the blink of an eyelid, vanished into nothingness ... One of our towers sailing high, suddenly went dark, turned over, wavered down, dismembered with leprous missing parts—and then in a ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... sorrow, around him; that she belonged to him, and to him alone; and the broken-hearted beggar followed the weeping Honoria towards his lady's chamber, with the step and bearing of a lord. He was wrong; there were pride and fierceness enough in his heart, mingled with that sense of nothingness of rank, money, chance and change, yea, death itself, of all but Love;—mingled even with that intense belief that his sorrows were but his just deserts, which now possessed all his soul. And in after years he knew that he was wrong; but ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... affirmative force which does not belong to it. Consider what is meant by the negative. It is the absence of something. It is not-being, and is the absence of all that constitutes being. Left to itself, it remains in its own nothingness, and it only assumes form and activity when we give these to it by ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... whirled millions of motes, danced before her eyes; and as her breath sent the atoms flying, it passed through her mind that at this very moment the reprobate utterance of a madman's lips was blowing happiness, joy, peace, and hope out of the lives of many thousands—blowing them into nothingness, like the blast ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... evil, America has the sole claim to the invention of the Yellow Press. It came, fully armed, from the head of its first proprietor, It owes nothing to Europe, nothing to the traditions of its own country. It grew out of nothing, and, let us hope, it will soon disappear into nothingness. The real Press of America was rather red than yellow. It had an energy and a character which still exist in some more reputable sheets, and which are the direct antithesis of Yellow sensationalism. The horsewhip and revolver were as necessary ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... his hand and clung to it again as they set out. At intervals they stopped, staring about them into nothingness, and listening. Twice Alan thought he heard sounds which did not belong to the night. The second time the little fingers tightened about his own, but his companion said no word, only her breath seemed to catch in her throat ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... the fleeting years." In this day there were some drops of the golden juices—some drops that she must squeeze out, that her thirsty lips must drink. For the years were fleeting away, and then there would come the black, eternal nothingness. She must turn all her attention towards the joys that might still be hers in the short time that was left her for joy—the short time, for she was a woman, ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... next, and the abiding one of the two is the world to come." Q "Thou sayst truly and I approve thy reply; but I would have thee tell me, how knowest thou that one of Allah's manifestations is this world and the other the world to come?"—"I know this because this world was created from nothingness and had not its being from any existing thing; wherefore its affair is referable to the first essence. Moreover, it is a commodity swift of ceasing, the works whereof call for requital of action and this postulateth the reproduction[FN101] of whatso passeth ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... But the true lesson of humility was taught by Newton, when he solved the problem of the world, and revealed the wonderful art displayed therein by the Supreme Architect. Never before, in the history of the human race, was so impressive a conviction made of the almost absolute nothingness of man, when measured on the inconceivably magnificent scale of the universe. No one, it is well known, felt this conviction more deeply than Newton himself. "I have been but as a child," said he, "playing on the sea-shore; now finding ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... massacres in the South; the banks of the Rhone and of the Durance are said to be covered with dead carcases, upon which the dogs are feeding. Garnier de Saintes addresses from the tribune the royalists of France. "Insects," (says he) "return "to your nothingness; ye shall perish, whilst we "shall be masters of the world, with which we will "share our fortune and our liberty." Tallien prophesies, that before three months a counter-revolution will be effected; and he therefore advises his colleagues to make their political ...
— Historical Epochs of the French Revolution • H. Goudemetz
... is easy enough for me to say it does not exist or to believe God never made it, and this would be a step in the right direction; but to annul this error entirely, I must be able to prove to myself, its nonexistence; that means I must fully understand the nothingness of evil under the guise of prejudice, and realize the ever-presence of Good, for if God (Good) is ever present, prejudice, or evil, is never present; now ...
— The Pastor's Son • William W. Walter
... BISHOP PETER came (That was the kindly Bishop's name), He heard these dreadful oaths with shame, And chid their want of dress. (Except a shell—a bangle rare - A feather here—a feather there The South Pacific Negroes wear Their native nothingness.) ...
— Fifty Bab Ballads • William S. Gilbert
... is a base and soulless world. At this moment, I doubt not, he is exacting, that under the masks of a Pantaloon and a Pulcinello there should be a heart glowing with unearthly desires and ideal aspirations, and that Harlequin should out moralise Hamlet upon the nothingness of sublunary things; and should it not be so, the dew will rise into his eyes, and he will turn his back on the whole scene ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... partial understanding of His will and way to Him, and He will be to you wisdom. Bring all the poverty of your natures, all the insufficiency of your religious character, all the inadequacy of your poor work, to your Lord. Feel it all. Let the conviction of your nothingness sink into your soul. Then wait before Him in simple faith, in lowly obedience, and power will come to you equal to your desire and to your duties, and He will put His spirit upon you, and will anoint you to proclaim liberty to ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... got out of the cab, and took a lamp and moved forward into nothingness, and found a railing and some steps, and after climbing the steps saw a star, which proved ultimately to be a light over a swing-door. He pushed open the swing-door, and was ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... attributes new meanings to the words of Parmenides and Heracleitus; but at times the old Eleatic philosophy appears to go beyond him; then the world of phenomena disappears, but the doctrine of ideas is also reduced to nothingness. All of them are nearer to one another than they themselves supposed, and nearer to him than he supposed. All of them are antagonistic to sense and have an affinity to number and measure and a presentiment of ideas. Even in ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... rapid and beneficial effect on these rude materials, and soon elicits manifestations of intelligence, and improves and developes the moral faculties. When one sees what is done by such small means, it is impossible not to reflect with shame and sorrow upon the little, or rather the nothingness, that is accomplished when the material is of the best description, and the means are unlimited,—upon the total absence of any system throughout places of education, either public or private, and consequently at the ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... forward, resting on her hands, stared across the appalling gulf of inky dark, and down into the nothingness. ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... her faded charms at times almost repulsive. And then Josephine had never borne him any children; and without a son to perpetuate his dynasty, the gigantic achievements which he had wrought seemed futile in his eyes, and likely to crumble into nothingness when he ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... have come to see through them—at least the worst ones and many thousands of them—all these busy little worms of public diplomacy building their faint vague little coral islands of bluff and unbelief far far away from us, out in the great ocean of their nothingness all by themselves. ...
— The Ghost in the White House • Gerald Stanley Lee
... daylight, at night transformed by witchfires of enchantment. The man and woman, in whom vitality was strong, combatted its blighting force, refused to be broken by its power. They desired with vehemence to assert themselves, to rebel, not to submit to the sense of their nothingness. They turned to one another hungry for the life that now was only within themselves. They had passed beyond the limits of the accustomed, were like detached particles gone outside the law of gravity, floating undirected through spaces where ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... mellow were its fruits! how bright its flow'rs! How strong and brave the beings, fit to share It with thee! 'Tis most strange that He, whose hand Fashions such wondrous things, should take delight In striking them to nothingness again! Perchance the author of all evil had Invaded it, and made it quite unfit To be a part of God's great universe. And yet thou lookest as if thou wert beyond The power of temptation to ...
— Mazelli, and Other Poems • George W. Sands
... This disgusted me. If that was the style of classical scholarship at Yale, I knew that there was nothing in it for me. It turned out as my friend said. That glib reciter did become the valedictorian of the class, but stepped from the commencement stage into nothingness, and was never heard of more. Goddard became the editor of one of the most important metropolitan news- papers of the United States, and, before his early death, distinguished himself as a writer ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... teacheth the other,—to be lowly in mind, and esteem every one better than ourselves. To be meek, patient, long-suffering, reason may persuade it, upon the consideration of our own baseness, emptiness, frailty, and nothingness. But this lesson is taught in Christ's school, not from that motive only,—the force of necessity, but from a higher motive,—the constraint of love to Jesus Christ,—"learn of me." Suppose there were no necessity of reason in it, yet affection might be a stronger necessity to persuade conformity ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... all are fled—the car is fled Into the light of heaven, and in their stead A sense of real things comes doubly strong, And, like a muddy stream, would bear along My soul to nothingness: but I will strive Against all doublings, and will keep alive The thought of that same chariot, and the strange Journey ...
— Poems 1817 • John Keats
... blood that gave them a momentary valour. It was from you and your inexhaustible vitality that these collaborating spectres drew what life they possessed; and when they parted from you they shuddered back into their nothingness. Where are the plays, where the romances which Maquet and the rest wrote in their own strength? They are forgotten with last year's snows; they have passed into the wide waste-paper basket of the world. You say of D'Artagnan, when severed from his three friends—from Porthos, ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... profoundly. Roncivalli was one of the most trusted of our committee, an Italian pur sang, a man whose family had suffered from Austrian misrule for half a century back. He represented a house which had been rich and noble, and had been persecuted into nothingness. No man had been louder in denunciation of the Austrian cruelty, no man apparently more sincere. There never lived a man who had more reason for sincerity. My first impression was that he must be spying upon the spies, for my opinion of his patriotism ...
— In Direst Peril • David Christie Murray
... dominion by the energy of the Brahma weapon, the five elements forsook the illustrious Ravana, and were consumed by the Brahma weapon, the physical ingredients of Ravana's body. His flesh and blood were all reduced to nothingness,—so that the ashes even could ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... lever and the method of the death intended for Locke was revealed. Directly under the suspended rope was a trap-door, which opened. Locke gazed down into blackness, nothingness. An emissary threw some small, heavy object into the yawning hole. For a long time nothing was heard. Then finally, far, far below there came to their ears the sound of a ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... of beauty is a joy forever; Its loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness; but still will keep A bower quiet for us; and a sleep Full of sweet dreams, and health, and ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... through the streets. The Boche had left the little town alone for some time; they had other things to do with their heavy guns; and all the French population, save those whose homes were reduced to nothingness, had remained. They took no notice of the distant bombardment. It had grown to be a phenomenon of nature like ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... just estimate of the sentiments that all external action causes for him. He very soon sees that no change has been wrought in him, that there is nothing new and nothing greater in the exercise of his physical faculties, and discovers his own real nothingness. Kings, even should they rule over the whole world, are condemned to live in a narrow circle like other men. They must even submit to the conditions of their lot, and their happiness depends upon the personal impressions that they receive. But ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... evidence with a pitiless logic, paid its own tribute—despite the anguish of the heart —to the pioneers of truth whose trail it followed into the Unknown, who had held no Mystery more sacred than Truth itself, who had dared to venture into the nothingness between the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... untwisting the shreds of my gloves. It seemed as though the world had slipped from under my feet and I was whirling into nothingness. ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath
... no type nor symbol stand, No mediator, were he more divine Than the incarnate Christ. All forms, all priests, I part aside, and hold communion free Beneath the empty sky of noon, with naught Between my nothingness and thy high heavens— Spirit with spirit. O, have mercy, God! Cleanse me from lust and bitterness and pride, Have mercy in accordance with my faith." Long time he lay upon the scorching grass, With his face buried in the tangled weeds. Ah! ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... human pity for their subject. This "honour" determines the actions which are acknowledged and praised by the world, while wounded pity takes refuge in a scarcely expressed, but all the more deeply moving, sublime melancholy, in which we recognise the essence of the world to be terror and nothingness. It is the Catholic religion which tries to bridge over this deep chasm, and nowhere else did it gain such profound significance as here, where the contrast between the world and pity was developed in a more pregnant, more precise, more plastic form than ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... was she didn't definitely know, but she did know that it concerned some close warm contact with life that she had as yet been unable to make. When she closed her eyes, strong warm hands seemed to come out of nothingness and touch her flushed cheeks. The fingers of the hands were strong like the branches of trees. They touched with the firmness and gentleness of the branches of trees nodding in ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... stupendous subject of contemplation than this has ever been offered to the mind of man. In comparison with the length of time thus required to efface the tiny individual atom, the entire cosmical career of our solar system, or even that of the whole starry galaxy, shrinks into utter nothingness. Whether we shall adopt the conclusion suggested must depend on the extent of our speculative audacity. We have seen wherein its probability consists, but in reasoning upon such a scale we may fitly be cautious ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... faded away to nothingness. If anybody had wondered at Johnny's course—a course that had run through possible dubiousness to hard-and-fast finality—the wonder was now inaudible. If anybody felt in him a lack of fastidiousness, the point was not pressed. The marriage seemed a happy solution, on the whole; and the people ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... the living self with its special idiosyncrasies you have known so long can have left the body, still more unnatural that it should (as so many now believe) have utterly ceased to exist and become nothingness! ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... and sing Scornful of man, and from his toils aloof Whose heart's a haunted woodland whispering; Whose thoughts return on tempest-baffled wing; Who hears the cry of God in everything, And storms the gate of nothingness ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... Souramanam, a method of calculating time. Space, Akasa; Swabhavat (q.v.) Sraddha, faith. Sravana, receptivity, listening. Sthula-Sariram, the gross physical body. Sukshmopadhi, fourth and fifth principles (Raja Yoga.) Sunyata, space; nothingness. Suras, elementals of a beneficent order; gods. Surpa, winnower. Suryasiddhanta, a Sanskrit treatise on astronomy. Sushupti Avastha, deep sleep; one of the four aspects of Pranava. Sutra period, one of the periods into which Vedic literature ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... brain is giddy. My pulse vibrates irregularly, and my heart beats with an audible distinctness. I am oppressed with a sense of my own nothingness—an atom, almost invisible, upon the ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... from the black cup of sleep. For a few hours all remained opaque to me. Oblivion and nothingness inundated me with their ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... tabernacle. Yes, the day shall yet come when the intercourse between cities shall be chiefly for purposes of religious improvement—when combinations for political intrigue, or mercantile speculation, which now waken such intensity of interest in our cities, shall dwindle to their comparative nothingness; and when the world's redemption shall assume its proper magnitude; and all be stimulated to more holy devotedness, and more heavenly effort. Oh, what a day, when all our increasing facilities of intercourse with the land, and with ...
— The National Preacher, Vol. 2. No. 6., Nov. 1827 - Or Original Monthly Sermons from Living Ministers • William Patton
... department of morals, is so constructed as to be unreadable. Now it will not be denied that as far as these two factors are concerned—and I repeat they are almost always found in combination—the position of the Book has dwindled almost to nothingness. One could give examples of almost every kind: one could show how poetry, no matter how appreciated or praised, no longer sells. One could show—and this is one of the worst signs of all—how men will buy by the hundred thousand anything ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... was a trying moment for Tad Butler, down there alone in the branches of the pinyon tree, with fifty feet of nothingness beneath him and a sheer wall that extended an ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in the Rockies • Frank Gee Patchin
... renewing of spirits were perfect, it would be real immortality, and the gift of eternal youth. But the same being imperfect, the animal insensibly loses his strength, decays and grows old, because everything that is created ought to bear a mark of nothingness from which it was drawn; ...
— The Existence of God • Francois de Salignac de La Mothe- Fenelon
... reveal the utter nothingness of this book, from the sale of which "Pope Eddy" is said to have realized, a half-million dollars. Says this modern goddess: "The word Adam is from the Hebrew Adamah, signifying the red color of the ground, dust, nothingness. Divide the name Adam into two syllables, ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... supreme agitation. A thousand memories and a thousand thoughts were stirring in me: I was conscious now, as I had not been before, of the past and the present, and these two existed in my mind, yet separated by a great gulf of time—a blank and a nothingness which yet oppressed me with its horrible vastness. How aimless and solitary, how awful my position seemed! It was like that of one beneath whose feet the world suddenly crumbles into ashes and dust, and is scattered throughout the illimitable void, while he survives, blown to ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... Lament," nor whistled "In the Sweet By-and-By." No; he whistled not at all, or, when he did, gay bits of jazz heard at the theatre or in a restaurant the night before. He deceived no one, least of all himself. Sometimes his voice would trail off into nothingness, but he would catch the tune and toss it up again, heavily, as though it ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... drank full draughts from the black cup of sleep; for an hour or two all remained in obscurity; Oblivion and Nothingness submerged ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... morbid fondness for shutting myself up face to face with my past. I had attributed exceptional importance to myself and had come to think that I was more than other people. But this had gradually become submerged in the positive nothingness of every day. ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... this awful time? Nowhere within the ken of the banished youth. In his own feeling Cosmo was outside the city of life—not even among the dogs—outside with bare nothingness—cold negation. Alas for him who had so lately offered to help another to pray, thinking the hour would never come to him when he could not pray! It had COME! He did not try to pray. The thought of prayer did not wake in him! Let no one say he was punished for his overconfidence—for ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... appearing as if they would come down and overwhelm us. During all my nautical career I had never been in an open boat exposed to such a gale, though frequently in a big ship, and even then I have felt the helplessness, the nothingness of man. Still more sensibly now was it brought before me—"He commandeth and raiseth the stormy wind, which lifteth up the waves thereof. They mount up to the heaven, they go down to the depths; their soul is melted because of trouble. Then they cry unto the Lord in their trouble, ...
— The Cruise of the Mary Rose - Here and There in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston
... three times upon the earth, and the magic palace, with all its treasures, vanished away into the nothingness out of which he had called it; and the gnome fled once more to the ...
— The Brown Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... damned? And I? It matters not! The deeper the abyss into which they fling me the better. Can Assa, if he is among the blest, remain in bliss, when he sees to what he has brought me? Oh! they must embalm me—I cannot bear to vanish, and rot and evaporate into nothingness!" ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... but conveyed No sense of meaning in their jargonings; Nor had cognizance from the stammered tones, Answered in turn, in verbal nothingness; The crabbed cynic might no longer rail; Nor those of sober countenance discourse In melancholy and foreboding strains; Nor light and frivolous sons of levity On others perpetrate the humorous jest; Fathers attempted to correct their sons, Who, listening ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... spot where stood her own lover, handsome Stanor, bending his head to overhear a remark from Honor, stroking his blonde moustache. He looked dejected, depressed; but compared with the depth of emotion on the other man's face, such meagre expressions faded into nothingness. The moment during which she gazed at his face held for Pixie the significance of years; then once more her eyes returned to the ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... right, my dear.... 'All is laughter, all is dust, all is nothingness, for the things that are arise out of the unreasonable....' I must get back. Give my love to Frances... and when next you see Gerda do try to persuade her that marriage is one of the things that don't matter and that ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... to identify her thoroughly. I had thought that I loved her, but I had not. It was the Lady of the Ice whom I loved; and, when Marion had revealed herself, then all was plain. After that revelation Nora sank into nothingness, and Marion ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... outgrowth, whose trinity is more like certain elements of Greek theology. Jehovah is the one supernatural power, the creator and lawgiver and immediate cause of all the workings of nature. It is he who shapes the world out of nothingness and who separates the waters from the dry land; he parts the waters of the Red Sea to save the Israelites, and brings them together again to overwhelm the pursuing hosts of Pharaoh. It is his voice that thunders from Mt. Sinai, and his finger that traces the commandments to rule ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... Olive's home. It was about seven in the evening, but all things lay as in the stillness of midnight. They two might have been the only beings in the living world—all else dead and buried under the white snow. And then, lifting itself out of the horizon's black nothingness, arose the great red moon, like an ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... day grew toward evening and all nature seemed full of beauty and peace. It can easily be imagined what this drive meant, then, to a fine, sensitive young woman, whose every instinct of youth and freedom and life had been crushed into undeveloped nothingness by years of gray convention in an old-fashioned ...
— The Point of View • Elinor Glyn
... trepidation the American slowly crawled out on the narrow rock. Below him yawned the hot darkness, above hung that black ominous canopy of nothingness. Slowly he advanced on hands and knees, every moment feeling the sharp rock growing narrower, till finally he reached the end. He looked ahead. He could but faintly see the ledge and Branasko's tall form silhouetted ...
— The Land of the Changing Sun • William N. Harben
... on your eerie, ghostly, superstitious side. He brings up into the imagination the malignity and hopelessness of the damned. He seems to people the night with wailing horrors. To a man dying of thirst in the desert, the jackal must just give the final touch of despair that makes death and nothingness seem best. It must be strange to die, surrounded by jackals at their ...
— In Mesopotamia • Martin Swayne
... very telling of which might sear the tongue. If China's poor had a certain apathy which seemed like poise, even in their wretchedness, not so India's, but, rather, a slow-moving misery, a dull progress toward nothing better, with only nothingness and its ...
— John Wesley, Jr. - The Story of an Experiment • Dan B. Brummitt
... thought that conceptions like these are calculated rather to depress than to elevate us in the scale of being; that, banished as he is by these contemplations to a corner of creation, and there reduced to an atom, man sinks to nothingness in this infinity of worlds. But a second thought corrects the impression. These vast contemplations are well calculated to inspire awe, but not abasement. Mind and matter are incommensurable. An immortal soul, even while clothed in "this muddy vesture ...
— The Uses of Astronomy - An Oration Delivered at Albany on the 28th of July, 1856 • Edward Everett
... "I have killed this Morhange, who was once a baby, who, like all the others, cost his mother so much trouble with his baby sicknesses. I have put an end to his life, I have reduced to nothingness the monument of love, of tears, of trials overcome and pitfalls escaped, which constitutes a human existence. What ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... within me, and shaking my fists I fell to fierce curses and revilings, like any madman, until what with my aching head and lack of breath, I cast myself face down and lay there spent with my futile ravings. Yet even so, bethinking me of all my fine schemes and purposes thus brought to nothingness and myself drifting impotent at the mercy of wind and wave, I sought to spit my puny anger against the God that made me, in blasphemies ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... in them); not only towards no happy goal for him or Mamma, or us, but at last towards hardly any goal at all for anybody! So mad did the affair grow;—and is so madly recorded in those inextricable, dateless, chaotic Books. We have now come to regions of Narrative, which seem to consist of murky Nothingness put on boil; not land, or water, or air, or fire, but a tumultuously whirling commixture of all the four;—of immense extent too. Which must be got crossed, in some human ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... chance; And when I feel, fair creature of an hour, That I shall never look upon thee more, Never have relish in the faery power Of unreflecting love; then on the shore Of the wide world I stand alone, and think Till love and fame to nothingness do sink. ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry
... time there was silence. Sinan, Lord of Death, seemed to be lost in thought under the black shade of his canopy; the double line of dais stared at nothingness across the passage way; the giant guards stood still as statues; Masouda watched the brethren from beneath her long eye-lashes, while the brethren watched the sharp edge of the shadow of the canopy on the marble floor. They strove to seem unconcerned, but their hearts were ...
— The Brethren • H. Rider Haggard
... the fine, pale face; he could distinguish only the flash of her eyes, surrounded by white mist, as one sees the splendor of the sun on a stormy morning. His temples throbbed cruelly, his sight grew turbid. The sweet stupor, soft and empty as nothingness, was succeeded by a sleep peopled with incoherent visions, of fiery images vibrating against a background of intense blackness, by torture which wrung from his breast groans of fear and cries of anguish. He was delirious. ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... the professor, the latter said, "All Englishmen are ridiculous; and you are a good specimen of the race. Why should you stop on the public highway and talk nothingness to a harmless girl?" ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... and beautiful, with its roots every day for a hundred years in the grave in which the acorn died. Children of God, we must go down deeper into the grave of Jesus. We must cultivate the sense of impotence, and dependence, and nothingness, until our souls walk before God every day in a deep and holy trembling. God keep us from being anything. God teach us to wait on Him, that He may work in us all He wrought in His Son, till Christ Jesus may live out His life in us! For this may God ...
— The Master's Indwelling • Andrew Murray
... the work of Richard Strauss appears to me up to the present. Guntram kills Duke Robert, and immediately lets fall his sword. The frenzied laugh of Zarathustra ends in an avowal of discouraged impotence. The delirious passion of Don Juan dies away in nothingness. Don Quixote when dying forswears his illusions. Even the Hero himself admits the futility of his work, and seeks oblivion in an indifferent Nature. Nietzsche, speaking of the artists of our time, laughs at "those Tantaluses of the will, rebels and enemies of laws, ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... brink, Saw menacing frowns and we were forth again. Time has no instant for the reckoning ought So sudden; 't was as if a lightning flash Threw us within it, and a swifter flash, We riding harmless down its swordlike edge, Shot us fast forth to empty nothingness. ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... stone to my body. I think they—" I had a momentary flash of the scene as Mercer saw it at that instant: the horrid noseless face close to his, the swart bodies moving with amazing agility. And at his very feet, a yawning precipice, holding nothing but darkness, leading down and down into nothingness. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... for it, with all my strength and all my power. It demands everything; its old cry, "Arise, arise, and follow me;" means giving up possessions, giving away all, making every sacrifice. Before this issue our little lives shrink into nothingness, and we must sink our happiness into the ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... tempting than anything ever I saw abroad in the domains of princes. Its air was charged with peace and order; the little puffs and coils and wisps of silver-grey smoke, coming out of the fireplace into the room, took long to swoon into nothingness ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... did not deceive me. I did not think for a moment that Charles meant to give his daughter to Max. But it answered my purpose by bringing Max to a realization of the nothingness of life in Styria, and opening his eyes to the glorious possibilities that lay in the great world beyond the ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major
... those moments of amiable weakness which make us all akin, when sublime ambition, the mystical predispositions of genius, the solemn sense of duty, all the heaped-up lore of ages, and the dogmas of a high philosophy alike desert us, or sink into nothingness. The voice of his mother sounded in his ear, and he was haunted by his father's anxious glance. Why was he there? Why was he, the child of a northern isle, in the heart of the Stony Arabia, far from the scene ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... son who is a traitor I disown! For treason is a crime without redress, 'Gainst which all else sinks into nothingness. ...
— Polyuecte • Pierre Corneille
... they topped a little rise. Over in front of them, and on all sides—the desert, vast, illimitable, untrod of man, lay, a desolate expanse of nothingness. ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham
... was cold; it sapped a man's strength, bit at his brain, weighted his hands and feet, weakened him. It strove to soften him into clay another could remold. Nothingness, darkness, all that was opposed to life and warmth and reality, arose in the night, gathered together ...
— Voodoo Planet • Andrew North
... distinction of day or night. That One breathed calmly, self-supported; then was nothing different from it, or above it. In the beginning darkness existed, enveloped in darkness. All this was undistinguishable water. That One which lay void and wrapped in nothingness was developed by the power of fervour. Desire first arose in It, which was the primal germ of mind (and which) sages, searching with their intellect, have discovered to be the bond which connects entity with non-entity. The ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... never pay. The billions of dollars that went up in the smoke of explosive nothingness would have been sufficient to have made a new world, one almost free from disease and completely free from poverty. Not an earth of fear, chaos, famine, pestilence, the DANSE MACABRE, but one broad land of peace, of prosperity, and ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... again to give credit—to be for ever on his guard, especially against his own instinctive movements. Quite unreserved, certainly, he never was again. Almost everywhere he could detect the hollow ring of fundamental nothingness under the apparent surface of things. Irony surely, habitual irony, would be the proper complement thereto, on his part. In his infallible self-possession, you might even fancy him a mere man of ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... them up. A few days ago life was as full of rich promise to me as our tropical spring. It is still, though I will never cease to feel the pain of this great sorrow, and yet this horrible pit of death, corruption, and nothingness yawns at my very feet. Mr. Haldane," she said in a still lower and more shuddering tone, "I have a terrible presentiment that I shall perish with this loathsome disease. I may seem to you, who are so quiet and brave, very weak and cowardly; but I shrink from death with a dread which ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... name given now to a habit of feeling, now to a system of opinion; as the former it denotes a tendency to dwell on the dark or gloomy side of things, culminating in a sense of their vanity and nothingness, while in the latter it is applied to all systems of opinion which lay the finger on some black spot in the structure of the life of the world or of the universe, which so long as it remains is thought to render it unworthy ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... of Darth appeared to roll toward the spaceboat again all the bright specks which were ships about them winked out of sight and there were only faraway stars and a vast blackness off to one side like nothingness ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... stop?" "No, my dear." She remembered being amused with that. "Aren't you even coming in?" "I am not. Good-bye. You enjoyed yourself?" "Oh, immensely." "That's what I like," he had said, and "pushed off," as his own phrase went. Atop of that, the return to James, and to nothingness. For nothing happened, except that he had been in a good temper throughout, which may easily have been because she had been in one herself—until the Easter holidays, when he had been very cross indeed. Poor James, to get him to begin to understand Lancelot's bluntness, ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... shall have the proofs, general, to-day—at once, provided that we thoroughly understand each other. I am ambitious, general, and I have no wish to be driven back for a single day into nothingness, as I should be, if my enemies withdraw their confidence in me. Now I am, at least, a member of the senate; but if the senate is dissolved, and I should subsequently be deposed again from the head of the police, I should be nothing ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... never can man cease to be. Never can he return to that awful center of nothingness, or be absorbed within the bosom of the unmanifested being. On, and on, and on, with Deific power, God moves in ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... pint of Moselle; but he had poor appreciation of the excellence of the viands or the delicate fragrance of the wine. The mental monologue still went on, and the young philosopher of the modern school was arguing the favorite modern question of the nothingness of everything, and the folly of taking too much trouble to walk upon a road that went nowhere, or to compass a work ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... valleys without shade, full of a brutal coldness, an intolerable heat, a dazzling light, a darkness that may be felt. Torano, that little town you come upon at the very threshold of the quarries, is like a town of the Middle Age, full of stones and refuse and narrow ways that end in a blind nothingness, and low houses without glass in the windows, and dogs and cats and animals of all sorts, goats and chickens and pigs, among which the people live. Thus busy with the frightful labour among the stones in the heart of the mountains, ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... we couldn't tell what might happen, because, as yet, we was nothing really but supermonkeys. That's what he called our noble race—supermonkeys! So I said yes; and these here philosophers that talked about subject and object and the nothingness of nothing reminded me of monkeys that get hold of a looking-glass and hold it up and look into it, and then sneak one paw round behind the glass to catch the other monkey. So he laughed again and ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... broiled beneath an untempered sun. Shadeless, grassless, it had been an abomination of desolution and a rallying-place for mosquitoes. Then had come the hand of man. First, the Royal Palm Hotel had sprung into stately existence, out of nothingness. Then other caravansaries. Palm and pine and vivid lawn-grass had followed. The mosquitoes had fled far back to the mangrove swamps. And a rarely beautiful ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... soul—these monstrous elemental Truths that underlie all things. As Father Robert's deep vibrating voice spoke, it appeared to Anthony as if the room, the walls, the house, the world, all shrank to filmy nothingness before the appalling realities of these things. In that strange and profound "Exercise of the senses" he heard the moaning and the blasphemies of the damned, of those rebellious free wills that have enslaved themselves into eternal bondage by a deliberate rejection ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... sky, and the twin towers of the old Mission rose in dazzling whiteness above a wilderness of verdure. The friendly faces on the wharf first merged themselves into a blurred mass of moving atoms, then sank into nothingness. ...
— Polly Oliver's Problem • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... muddy, and the little ridges of fresh earth and roots along its brink were conspicuous. The beaver now went very cautiously, sniffing the air for any hint of peril. After winding along for some twenty or thirty yards, the new canal shoaled out to nothingness behind a screen of alder; and here, in a mess of mud and water, the beaver found one of his comrades hard at work. There was much of the new canal yet to do, and winter ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... would like to see the stunt fully developed. I should like to have that lovely wilding growth delicately nurtured into drama as limitless and lawless as life itself, owing no allegiance to plot, submitting to no rule or canon, but going gayly on to nothingness as human existence does, full of gleaming lights, and dark with inconsequent glooms, musical, merry, melancholy, mad, but never-ending as the ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... said to himself, "And is it true that death shall one day overtake me? And who is he that shall make mention of me after death, when time delivereth all things to forgetfulness? When dead, shall I dissolve into nothingness? Or is there life beyond, and another world?" Ever fretting over these and the like considerations, he waxed pale and wasted away, but in the presence of his father, whenever he chanced to come to him, ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... approached the lady without being repelled by the offensive smirk that she assumed, no dependent ever ventured near her without the fear of the scowl that sat naturally (and fearfully, when she pleased) upon her dark and inauspicious brow. What wonder that little Jehu was crushed into nothingness, behind his own counter, under the eye of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... do you say? Life is cruel. Life is a splendid portico—to nothingness. Ah, no! not if in that portico you have stood for a moment, loving and beloved, by the side of Isabel. Life is splendid! life is kind! life is abounding, deep-cupped! and each minute of it ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... Human soul, by God created Out of nothingness yet wrought As of great price, From corruption separated, Sublimated, To glorious perfection brought By skilled device; 8 Plant that in this valley growest Flowers celestial for to give Of fairest scent, Hence to that high hill thou goest Where ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... to say, for, on seeing the grand establishment I had anticipated dwarfed to such very humble proportions, I felt terribly small and contemptible in my own sight. The dignity that I had so recently aired at the old man's expense shrank into nothingness, and I was quite relieved that he did not take advantage of the opportunity to "put me down ...
— On Board the Esmeralda - Martin Leigh's Log - A Sea Story • John Conroy Hutcheson
... hell, to live in the moon as a disembodied soul in the realm of nothingness, and to remember the earth, where are green grass and red blood, where the air echoes with the roll of the thunder and the kisses of lovers, where life and death exist. And yet something whispered to Michael that he must take refuge among the exiles to that region of annihilation. ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... life, a sick epicure's dream, Incoherent and gross, even grosser had past, Were it not for that cordial and soul-giving beam Which his friendship and wit o'er thy nothingness cast:— ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... dream. I cannot put the glory With which it filled my being, in a story. No one can tell a dream. Now to confess. The dream made daily life a nothingness, Merely a mould which white-hot beauty fills, Pure from some source of passionate joys and skills. And being flooded with my vision thus, Certain of winning, puffed and glorious, Walking upon this earth-top like a king, My judgment went. I did a ...
— Right Royal • John Masefield
... when you are telling them, "These are the chastenings of an all-wise and merciful Providence, sent for some inscrutable but just and beneficent purpose, it may be, to humble our pride, or to punish our unfaithfulness, or to impress us with the sense of our own nothingness and dependence on His mercy," when you are thus addressing your suffering fellow-subjects, and encouraging them to bear without repining the dispensations of Providence, may God grant that by your decision of this night you may have laid in store for yourselves the consolation ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... piteousness of him is like the wailing of a lamb led to the slaughter. Grass is good to graze on, saith lambkin,—other lambs are fair to frisk with,—but alas!— neither grass nor lambs can last, and therefore as lambkin cannot always be lambkin, it bleats its end in Nothingness! But, thank God, there is something stronger and wiser in the ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... blue. Dispersing in air, these mists took all manner of fantastic forms,—ghostly arms seemed to wave and beckon, ghostly hands to unite in prayer,—and fluttering creatures in gossamer draperies of green and crimson, appeared to rise and float, and retire and shrink, to nothingness again in the rainbow drift and sweep of whirling foam. Errington gazed unconcernedly down on the seething abyss. He pushed back his cap from his brow, and let the fresh wind play among his dark, clustering curls. His nerves were steady, and ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... race—a swarming of strength, an endless fountain of life, against which it became impossible to battle. Amid her stupefaction at finding the breach repaired when scarce opened, Constance realized her powerlessness and nothingness, childless as she was fated to remain. And she felt vanquished, overcome with awe, swept away as it were herself; thrust aside by the victorious flow of ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... expectation, what a frightful thing art thou, when kindled more by fear than hope! How dost thou twist thyself round the heart, torturing its pulsations! How dost thou dart unknown pangs all through our feeble mechanism, now seeming to shiver us like broken glass, to nothingness—now giving us a fresh strength, which can do nothing, and so torments us by a sensation, such as the strong man must feel who cannot break his fetters, though they bend in his grasp. Slowly paced ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... forgotten. We may not hide away the dear old gnomes and pixies and fairies in consecrated ground—that is reserved for what has once existed, and so has the right to live again; but for what never existed we can find no sepulchre, for it came out of nothingness, and ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... achieves a definition of energy, possibly it may borrow the figure: Energy is the inherent effort of every multiplicity to become unity. Adam's poetry was an expression of the effort to reach absorption through love, not through fear; but to do this thoroughly he had to make real to himself his own nothingness; most of all, to annihilate pride; for the loftiest soul can comprehend that an atom,—say, of hydrogen,—which is proud of its personality, will never merge in a molecule of water. The familiar verse: "Oh, why should the spirit ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... lie and dream of nothingness; For visions come From Poppydom Direct at our command: Or, delicate alternative, In open idleness we live, With lyre and lute And silver flute, The life ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... slender, trembling figure. But something approaching a miracle—a very human miracle—had just happened. All those doubts, fears, indecisions, unexpressed desires, agonies of self-abasement, which might have delayed their understanding and happiness for weeks and months, had been swept into nothingness by the incisive kindliness of Miss Sherwood. In one minute she had said all they might have said in months; there was nothing more to say. There was nothing left of the past to discuss. Before them was only the fact of that immediate ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... a box of tapes. Travis touched the edge of that box gingerly, half expecting it to crumble into nothingness. This was a place long deserted. Stone table, bench, the towers could survive through centuries of abandonment, but these ...
— The Defiant Agents • Andre Alice Norton
... of Bossuet's declamations upon the nothingness of kings, the pitifulness of mortal aims, the crushing ever-ready grip of the hand of God upon the purpose and faculty of man, rather filled the mind with exaltation than really depressed or humiliated it. From Bossuet to Pascal is to pass from the solemn ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 2 of 3) - Essay 1: Vauvenargues • John Morley
... of human hands had wrought destruction so utter and overwhelming. Where masonry walls had been was a vast junk heap; where stout magazines had been bedded down in hard concrete was a crater; where strong barracks had stood was a jumbled, shuffled nothingness. ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... Envoy The Song of the Sword Arabian Nights' Entertainments Bric-e-Brac Ballade of the Toyokuni Colour-Print Ballade of Youth and Age Ballade of Midsummer Days and Nights Ballade of Dead Actors Ballade Made in the Hot Weather Ballade of Truisms Double Ballade of Life and Death Double Ballade of the Nothingness of Things At Queensferry Orientale In Fisherrow Back-View Croquis Attadale, West Highlands From a Window in Princes Street In the Dials The gods are dead Let us be drunk When you are old Beside the idle summer sea The ways of Death ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... charge, moved a mighty, gigantic crevasse, whose sides were the walls of the hives left standing. And still the cube-army moved in, grinding everything it touched to dust, trampling buildings into nothingness, destroying utterly along a front hundreds of miles wide, and as deep as ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... especially as the obstacles which had confronted him nearly two years back were now more hope-baffling than ever. For the intervening months had not brought the desirable "thrifle more wit" to his unsteady brother Thady, who, on the contrary, was developing into one of those people whose good-for-nothingness is taken as a matter of course even by themselves; and a bolt was thus, so to speak, drawn across Mick's ...
— Stories by English Authors: Ireland • Various
... Its pasture-lands and meadow-lands, blossom-decked and water-fed, crossed and recrossed by never-ending hedgerows, that stretch away and lose themselves in misty nothingness, are fair as a poet's dream. Birds carol in the white hawthorn and the yellow furze all day long, and the fragrant summer winds that blow lazily across the fields are laden with the perfume ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... be brought about except by our becoming nothing. Nothingness is true prayer, which renders to God "honour, and glory, and power, for ever ...
— A Short Method Of Prayer And Spiritual Torrents • Jeanne Marie Bouvires de la Mot Guyon
... the country; such as the Mawsh-ko-desh, Urons, Ossaw-gees—who formerly occupied Saw-gi-naw bay; and the Odaw gaw-mees, whose principal habitation was about the vicinity of Detroit River. They are entirely vanished into nothingness. Not a single page of their history can be found on record in the history of this country, or hardly an allusion to their existence. My own race, once a very numerous, powerful and warlike tribe of Indians, who proudly trod upon this soil, is also near the end of existence. In a few more ...
— History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan • Andrew J. Blackbird
... human want of understanding. In the folly of Claude there is still a gleam of grace and innocence; there is refreshment in his childishness, and tenderness in his inability. But the folly of Salvator is disgusting in its very nothingness: it is like the vacuity of a plague-room in an hospital, shut up in uncleansed silence, emptied of pain and ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... propriety communicate to Congress. But he had apparently failed to satisfy his own conscience in thus summarily reasoning the executive and governmental power of a young, compact, vigorous, and thoroughly organized nation of thirty millions of people into sheer nothingness and impotence. How supremely absurd was the whole national panoply of commerce, credit, coinage, treaty power, judiciary, taxation, militia, army and navy, and Federal fag, if, through the mere joint of a defective law, the hollow reed of a secession ordinance ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... eyes could see how a spider's thread, woven from one tall plant to another, and wavering ever so delicately in the faint breeze, was one moment lit here and there to a line of pure light that merged into nothingness and gleamed out again, while a moment later it might have vanished entirely or else shine its length. The midges, dancing in mid-air, were living sun-motes for one flash, then were swallowed up as suddenly as though they had slipped through into the fourth dimension. A pair of white butterflies, ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... was shuddering rapidly. A peculiar feeling, as if his belly were turned into nothingness, made him want to press his fists into his abdomen. He remained shuddering drunkenly, like a drunken man who is sick, incapable of thought ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... vanish then? Are you sure of that?—sure, that the nothingness of the grave will be a rest from this troubled nothingness; and that the coiling shadow, which disquiets itself in vain, cannot change into the smoke of the torment that ascends for ever?[250] Will ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... The sun had just risen over the hilltops of Lauzon, throwing aside his drapery of gold, purple, and crimson. The soft haze of the summer morning was floating away into nothingness, leaving every object fresh with dew and magnified in the limpid purity of ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... intensity unfathomable by words my utter nothingness, impotence, and worthlessness in and for myself. I have learned what a sin is against an infinite, imperishable being such as is the soul of man. The consolations, at least the sensible sweetness of hope, I do not possess. On the contrary, the temptation which I have constantly to fight ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... The snow-clads of the latter look down upon it from the west, and far away to the east stands Orizaba, highest peak of Mexico. In the haze of sunset its great mantle of new-fallen snow stood out sharply, darker streaks that ran down through the lower reaches of snow dying out in nothingness, as the mountain did itself, for as a matter of fact the latter was not visible at all, but only the snow that covered its upper heights, surrounded above, below, and on all sides by the thin gray sky of evening. By night there was music in the plaza. But how can there be life and laughter ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... the Vast, the Deep Beyond all mortal sight, The Nothingness that conceived The worlds of day and night, The Nothingness that heaved Pure sides in virgin sleep, Brought out of Darkness, light; And ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... poured itself out of Niflheim, the place of darkness and dread. And Odin knew that the world must not be left between Surtur, who would destroy it with fire, and Niflheim, that would gather it back to Darkness and Nothingness. He, the eldest of the Gods, would have to win the wisdom that would help ...
— The Children of Odin - The Book of Northern Myths • Padraic Colum
... darkness rang the metallic reverberations from the battering on the four doors all around. The fluid nothingness was a place of fear. Its nerve-shattering, mind-confusing bedlam might have come from the fantastic anvils ...
— The Affair of the Brains • Anthony Gilmore
... at last at a pure and virile faith; but the road to this point is long, and sown thick with obstacles, and at the moment at which we have arrived he had not yet entered upon it, he did not even suspect its existence; all he knew was that pleasure leads to nothingness, to satiety and self-contempt. ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... the darkness was intense, I had to strain my eyes to see the man in front, Stoner. In the darkness he was a nebulous dark bulk that sprang into bold relief when the starlights flared in front. When the flare died out we stumbled forward into pitch dark nothingness. The pathway was barely two feet across, a mere tight-rope in the wide waste, and on either side nothing stood out to give relief to the desolate scene; over us the clouds hung low, shapeless and gloomy, ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill
... flawless heaven with the stellar and planetary universe in it, pitiless and passionless eyes perhaps—as Tennyson calls them—and strange fires; but in this case without power to burn and brand their nothingness into the visitors to St. Sennans, who laughed and talked and smoked and took no notice; and, indeed, rather than otherwise, considered that Orion's Belt and Aldebaran had been put there to make it a fine night for them to laugh and ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... They are too often like bomb-shells, that in exploding scatter ruin on all around. They have also been named air-castles, chateaux en Espagne, 'baseless fabrics of a vision.' The baseless fabric of a vision is built of 'airy nothingness;' but men found on a wish, structures that tower to heaven, put real, solid material into them, and when they fall, as fall they must—I'll not attempt to give an idea of the utter desolation they leave, of the waste place they make of the heart, lest you should ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... with by thunderers from the pulpit or indignant fathers of families. Meantime the States-General felt instinctively that the little commonwealth grew richer, the more useful or agreeable things its burghers could call into existence out of nothingness, to be exchanged for the powder and bullets, timber and cordage, requisite for its eternal fight with universal monarchy, and that the richer the burghers grew the more capable they were of paying their taxes. It was not the fault of the States that the insane ambition of Spain and ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... shelter of a high cliff. A fire of driftwood was built and supper cooked. Next morning the sun was melting the ice on the hillsides and the frost had converted the wild grapes that hung above them into clusters of pearls. But the beauty of the scene faded into nothingness when they found they had withstood the cold of the night, while the Crow Creek Agency was just on the other side of the river. The journey was resumed in silence and a few miles below, a glimpse of the Stars and Stripes was caught through ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... salon; and I still lay quiet, feeling as if death were inevitable, but wishing that the agony of death were past. Again faintness stole over me; but just as I was sinking into the horrible feeling of nothingness, I heard Amante's voice ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... It is not sufficient to possess a woman to impress on her soul a profound and durable mark. Souls are almost impenetrable, a fact showing the cruel emptiness of love. The wise man ought to say to himself, I am nothing in the nothingness which that creature is. To hope that you could leave a remembrance in a woman's heart is equivalent to trying to impress a seal on running water. And therefore let us never nurse the wish to establish ourselves in what is fleeting ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... being of human reason. A spirit has no body; an infinite being is a being which is not finite; a perfect being is a being which is not imperfect. Can any one form any real notions of such a multitude of deficiencies or absence of ideas? That which excludes all idea, can it be anything but nothingness? To pretend that the divine attributes are beyond the understanding of the human mind is to render God unfit for men. If we are assured that God is infinite, we admit that there can be nothing in common between Him and His creatures. To say that God is infinite, ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... nobility, which arrogated to itself all prerogatives and rights, and the more numerous class of burghers, set on the lower step of the social ladder. These latter wanted, not so much to get up to the level of their superiors, as to bring them down to their own, and even precipitate them into the abyss of nothingness below. They have almost succeeded; and the prestige of noble blood has passed away, perhaps forever, in spite of Vico's well- known theory. But the now triumphant burgher in his turn sees the dim mass, lost in the darkness and indistinctness of the lowest pool of humanity, rising up grim ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... over the edge!" As the driver's only response to my command was to grin at us reassuringly over his shoulder, I looked about for a soft place to land. But there was only rock-plated highway whizzing past and on the outside the road dropped sheer away into nothingness. We took the first turn with the near-side wheels in the gutter, the off-side wheels on the bank, and the car tilted at an angle of forty-five degrees. The second bend we navigated at an angle of sixty degrees, the off-side wheels on ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell
... sanity, he said to himself, for the sake of the child. Otherwise it would be good to lose all remembrance, to forget, to dream, to lapse into the nothingness of the vacant eye, the down-drooping lid and ...
— The Way of the Wind • Zoe Anderson Norris
... the conscience that for so far less an offence the sister had been thrown aside, the comfort, perhaps, found in her gentle and neglected child obstinately repelled; then the conviction of all earthly vanity and nothingness,—the look on into life, with the chilling sentiment that affection was gone, that he could never trust again, that he was too old to open his arms to new ties; and then, before felt singly, all these thoughts united, and ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... looked, I saw them fade and fade; until, slowly, they resolved into nothingness. Now, I looked again at the candles. They shone wanly, and, even as I watched, grew more unreal, and so vanished. The room was filled, now, with a soft, yet luminous, white twilight, like a gentle mist of light. Beyond this, I could see nothing. ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... riding to Baxter and taking the train from thence to El Paso—his eyes open to what he was doing, both as a self-appointed Samaritan and as a much-wanted individual in the town where Pete lay unconscious, on the very last thin edge of Nothingness. ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... eye, which looks fixedly at me with a diabolical expression. As time goes, it does not remain long; but as agony counts, it seems to take years of my life away with it. It fades as suddenly into grey mist and nothingness as it comes, and, wet with perspiration, and struggling to keep back screams of mad terror, I bury my ...
— The Strand Magazine: Volume VII, Issue 37. January, 1894. - An Illustrated Monthly • Edited by George Newnes
... with the development of metaphysics and visions, until man, in this dungeon of despondency, feeling his heart melt, conceived of abnegation, charity, tender love, gentleness, humility, human brotherhood, here in the idea of universal nothingness and there under that of the fatherhood of God. Look around at the regulative instincts and faculties implanted in a race; in brief, the turn of mind according to which it thinks and acts at the present day; we shall find most frequently that ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... naught? Who, during the invasion of the barbarians, protected the poor against their conquerors? Who, in the middle age, stood between the baron and his serfs? Who, in their monasteries, realized spiritual democracy,—the nothingness of rank and wealth, the practical might of co-operation and self-sacrifice? Who delivered England from the Pope? Who spread throughout every cottage in the land the Bible and Protestantism, the book and the religion which declares that a man's soul is free in the sight of God? Who, at ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... equally impressed with the momentousness of death and of burial fees; he languishes at once for immortal life and for "livings;" he has a fervid attachment to patrons in general, but on the whole prefers the Almighty. He will teach, with something more than official conviction, the nothingness of earthly things; and he will feel something more than private disgust if his meritorious efforts in directing men's attention to another world are not rewarded by substantial preferment in this. His secular man believes in cambric bands and silk stockings as characteristic ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... should succeed in persuading George that he was really guilty—in which case, what would George, the righteous man, counsel? And last and chief of all, what hope of peace to Leopold could he in any of his counsel—except indeed he led him up to the door of death, and urged him into the nothingness behind it? Then what if George should be wrong, and there WAS something behind it? Whatever sort of a something it might be, could the teaching of George be in the smallest measure a preparation for it? Were it not better, so far as the POSSIBILITY which remained untouched ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... due to this short period of intensive training, "under men who were intelligent enough to know just what was needed and just how to go about to secure it"—men not hampered by any pedagogical nonsense or grown stale over a long attempt to discriminate between the "infinity of nothingness and the nothingness of infinity" (as one might summarize a rather common criticism), rather than to the former years of patient toil, and discipline, and accomplishment which had really laid the foundation so well that all were able ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... with a warm welcome among the Martians. What a lion I should be!" I looked longingly at the distant planet, the outlines of whose continents and seas appeared most enticing, but when I tried to propel myself in that direction I only kicked against nothingness. ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss
... and lo! where it had been, stood another city, different, utterly different, only a hundred times more glorious. Out of the prodigal heart of the world-rose were they created, into the black bosom of nothingness were they gathered; whilst others, ever more perfect, pressed into their place. So, too, changed the mountains, and so the trees, while the gulfs became a garden and the fiery lakes a pleasant stream, and from the seed of the strange flowers grew immemorial forests wreathed about ...
— The Ghost Kings • H. Rider Haggard
... But I'd sure like to see any blamed old slide get the best of me, that's all. I'm going to seal that slide down so that it'll stay there for a million years. And when the last trump sounds, and Sonoma Mountain and all the other mountains pass into nothingness, that old slide will be still a-standing there, ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... her car seemed to sail out into nothingness like some weird aerial monster, the headlights streaming uncannily through space—then blackness—and ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... a way out of the darkness, he was obliged to turn back time and again. If gangs of shadows fought with knives at the end of a street which had at first looked promising, what business had shadows cursing or screaming or bleeding? If the madman who enjoined the mob to fight in the service of nothingness was only a mouse dancing on a summit of garbage, why did they cheer? At the end of still another street, a mass rape may not have been in progress; the participants may not have waited sullenly in a long line; a macrocephalic ...
— In the Control Tower • Will Mohler
... again; a universal war is just upon the point of breaking out; all outlets will be shut up. I shall be secure in my nothingness, while you, that will be so absurd as to exist, will envy me. You don't tell me what proficiency you make in the noble science of defence. Don't you start still at the sound of a gun? Have you learned to say ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... her marriage, Jeanne passed calmly and peacefully, as if she were almost exhausted by the number of pleasant hours she had lately had. The morning of the eventful day she had no time to think; she was only conscious of a great sense of nothingness within her, as if beneath her skin, her flesh, and blood, and bones had vanished, and she noticed how her fingers trembled when ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
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