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More "Out of nothing" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and they could not know what they were because there were none. Pyrot's guilt was indefeasible through its very nullity. And it was with a legitimate pride that Greatauk, expressing himself as a true artist, said one day to General Panther: "This case is a master-piece: it is made out of nothing." The seven hundred Pyrotists despaired of ever clearing up this dark business, when suddenly they discovered, from a stolen letter, that the eighty thousand trusses of hay had never existed, that a most distinguished nobleman, Count ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... which to make one; there was no timber near! We were in the middle of a naked prairie. The universal mesquite—the algar obia glandulosa— excellent for such a purpose—grew nowhere in the neighbourhood. Who was to find the torch? Even Rube's ingenuity could not make one out of nothing. ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... hypocrites. It is always the divine rule that the cross and affliction should precede consolation. God never comforts any but the afflicted, just as he never quickens unto life any but the dead, nor ever justifies any but sinners! He always creates all things out of nothing. ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... no wrong out of nothing," cried Helen. "If you break confidence with your husband, that confidence will never, never ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... no god (Jesus, Jehovah, Allah, Buddha) created the universe out of nothing, for the matter and force which enter into its constitution ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown
... house or home as a test, we may very generally lay the simple spiritual foundations of the idea. God is that which can make something out of nothing. Man (it may truly be said) is that which can make something out of anything. In other words, while the joy of God be unlimited creation, the special joy of man is limited creation, the combination of creation with limits. Man's pleasure, therefore, is to possess conditions, ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... What is it to surprise us? Here we are Engendered out of nothing cognisable— If this were not a wonder, nothing is; If this be wonderful, then all is so. Man's grosser attributes can generate What is not, and has never been at all; What should forbid his fancy to restore ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... selves, and receive pleasure from the objects which surround us, sufficient to indear to us the possession and injoyment of Life, we cannot from thence but infer, that this Wise and Powerful Being is also most Good, since he has made us out of nothing to give us a Being wherein we find such Happiness, as makes us very ...
— Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian life • Lady Damaris Masham
... coincidences combined, coming out of nothing as it were, advancing like spirits summoned on to the stage, all to effect this end! Think of the American Colonies; with one little exception they were perhaps the most completely non-Catholic society of their time. Their successful rebellion against the mother country ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... great classic models of which their minds were full. The attempt was bold, and the Pleiad did not pretend to consult the taste of the vulgar. "The obscurity of Ronsard," says M. Guizot, in his Corneille et son Temps, "is not that of a subtle mind torturing itself to make something out of nothing; it is the obscurity of a full and a powerful mind, which is embarrassed by its own riches, and has not learned to regulate the use of them. Furnished, by his reading of the ancients, with that which was wanting in our poetry, Ronsard thought he could perceive in his ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... Nothing, then, could come out of nothing; all the visible structure of the universe had its origin in the movements of the atoms that constituted it, and conditioned its infinite changes. The atoms, by a useful but perhaps too convenient metaphor, ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... of it. I know nothing about mad people, but I am sure that no honest man ever invented a story out of nothing and then became crazy because it did not ...
— A Cigarette-Maker's Romance • F. Marion Crawford
... of Prospero is neither more cunning nor more powerful than the pen of a well bred author. It creates something out of nothing, (more frequently nothing out of something), changes time, place, and human nature; it lifts up the blue roofing of ocean, and gives you a glimpse of fish-life; and deeper still, shows you the coral forests of the Naiads, and their aquatic palaces. ...
— Daisy's Necklace - And What Came of It • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... while a thousand fiery tongues, as from some hundred-headed monster, shot out incessantly, and licking the air a moment, were gone forever. Occasionally this thick, cloudy veil concealed all but the spars of the enemy from sight, and then the tall masts seemed rising, by some potent spell, out of nothing; occasionally the terrific explosions would rend and tear asunder the curtain, and, for an instant, the black hulls would loom out threateningly, and then disappear. The roar of three hundred guns shook the island and fort unremittingly: the water that washed the sand-beach, ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... match. The challenge was instantly accepted. The Gipsies placed themselves in the circular form, and both being in the middle, commenced with their conjuring powers to the best advantage. At last the narrator proposed the making of something out of nothing. This proposal was accepted. A stone which never existed, was to be created, and appear in a certain form in the middle of a circle made on the turf. The master of the gang commenced, and after much stamping with his foot, and the narrator ...
— The Gipsies' Advocate - or, Observations on the Origin, Character, Manners, and Habits of - The English Gipsies • James Crabb
... perform miracles; but in order to perform a miracle, it is necessary to have the faculty of creating new causes capable of producing effects opposed to those which ordinary causes can produce. Can we realize how God can give to men the inconceivable power of creating causes out of nothing? Can it be believed that an unchangeable God can communicate to man the power to change or rectify His plan, a power which, according to His essence, an immutable being can not have himself? Miracles, far from doing much honor to God, far from proving the Divinity ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... the least sentimental, her natural disposition inclining her to be more than cheerful, actually gay. She soon recovered herself, and when, a short time after, she stood, scissors in hand, demonstrating how very easy it was to make something out of nothing, her sisters never suspected how very near tears had lately been to those bright eyes, which were always the ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... heightening every danger; representing the English and Dutch captains to be men incapable of hearing reason, or distinguishing between honest men and rogues; or between a story calculated for our own turn, made out of nothing, on purpose to deceive, and a true genuine account of our whole voyage, progress, and design; for we might many ways have convinced any reasonable creature that we were not pirates; the goods we had ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe
... still the manuscripts dropped down regularly on the editor's desk. Comedies, dialogues, homilies, one-act tragedies, storiettes, sepia panels, word-etchings, satires, tone-poems, fuges, bourrees,—something different every day. Rarely anything hopelessly out of key. Stories seemingly born out of nothing, and written—to judge by the typing—in ten minutes, but in reality, as a rule, based upon actual incident, developed by a period of soaking in the peculiar chemicals of Ben's nature, and written with much sophistication in the choice of words. There were dramatic studies often intensely ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... men, can find or make a party question, and quarrel out of any thing or out of nothing. There was a Scotch pedlar, who used to come every Thursday evening to our school to supply our various wants and fancies. The Scotch pedlar died, and two candidates offered to supply his place, ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... cases, is apt to be nothing but recollection in disguise, the shaking of a kaleidoscope formed of fragmentary reminiscences. I remember once, in some momentary access of ambition, trying to invent a play. I occupied several hours of a long country walk in, as I believed, creating out of nothing at all a dramatic story. When at last I had modelled it into some sort of coherency, I stepped back from it in my mind, as it were, and contemplated it as a whole. No sooner had I done so than it began to seem vaguely familiar. "Where have I seen this story before?" ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... excel (though the task was difficult) thy usual excellings. Since the moon-calf who earliest discovered the Pandemonium of Milton in an expiring wood-fire—since the first ingenious urchin who blew bubbles out of soap and water, thou, my best of friends, hast the highest knack at making histories out of nothing. Wert thou to plant the bean in the nursery-tale, thou wouldst make out, so soon as it began to germinate, that the castle of the giant was about to elevate its battlements on the top of it. All that happens to thee gets a touch of the wonderful and the sublime from thy own rich ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... with the idea of a being more perfect than my own; for to derive it from nothing was manifestly impossible; and, because it is no less repugnant that the more perfect should follow and depend upon the less perfect than that something should come forth out of nothing, I could not ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... "Nonsense! she came out of nothing in the world but curiosity, and because she likes making people uncomfortable. She knew very well mother ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... needful, by a couple of comparatively bloodless campaigns. Those who looked more deeply into causes felt that the limitations of Imperial authority, the ambition of a great republic, suddenly starting into existence out of nothing, and the great issues of the religious reformation, were matters not so easily arranged. When the scene shifted, as it was so soon to do, to the heart of Bohemia, when Protestantism had taken the Holy Roman Empire by the beard in its ancient palace, and thrown ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... II, 144), and there is also a version attributed to Dryden. page 260 13.—Lope Felix de Vega Carpio (1562-1635) was the most fertile playwright ever known to the world. Alone he created the Spanish drama almost out of nothing. Born at Madrid, where he spent most of his life, Lope was an infant prodigy who fulfilled the promise of his youth. His first play was written at the age of thirteen. He fought against the Portuguese in the expedition of 1583 and took part in the disastrous Armada of 1588. His life was marked ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... went into ecstasies over this irreverent trifling, Delsarte did not disdain to caricature it, and gave us a most comical little performance. Here again we see how he could transform everything, and make something out of nothing! ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... of France. Without the war of 1870-1871, Gambetta had never become what he did become. Place the naturally gifted child of intelligent parents among savages, and he becomes a savage. Whatever a man is, society has made him. Ideas are not creations that spring from the head of the individual out of nothing, or through inspiration from above; they are products of social life, of the Spirit of the Age, raised in the head of the individual. An Aristotle could not possibly have the ideas of a Darwin, and a Darwin could not choose ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... we have shown the doctrine of Matter or corporeal substance to have been the main pillar and support of Scepticism, so likewise upon the same foundation have been raised all the impious schemes of Atheism and Irreligion. Nay, so great a difficulty has it been thought to conceive Matter produced out of nothing, that the most celebrated among the ancient philosophers, even of those who maintained the being of a God, have thought Matter to be uncreated and co-eternal with Him. How great a friend material substance ...
— A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge • George Berkeley
... some deliberately, and some only by accident; some of malice, and some only of misfortune; some innocently and unknowingly, and whom we never properly hurt. Some, also, by our mere existence; some by our best actions; some because we have helped and not hurt others; and some out of nothing else but the pure original devilry of their own evil hearts. And then, when we take all these men home to our hearts, what hearts all these men give us! Who, then, is the man here who has done to other men the most hurt? Who has caused or ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... of the first of these events—the beginning of the whole series? Are we to think of the series of events in time as having a beginning and possibly an end, or as being without beginning or end? What in fact are we to make of the theological idea of Creation, often further defined as Creation out of nothing? It is often suggested both by Idealists and by Realists that the idea of a creation or absolute beginning of the world is unthinkable. Such a view seems to me to be a piece of unwarrantable a priori dogmatism—quite as much so as the closely connected idea that the Uniformity of Nature ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... positive institutions of credit, defined by law and sanctioned by the force of the state. Pure enacted institutions which are strong and prosperous are hard to find. It is too difficult to invent and create an institution, for a purpose, out of nothing. The electoral college in the Constitution of the United States is an example. In that case the democratic mores of the people have seized upon the device and made of it something quite different from what the inventors planned. All institutions have come ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... out of nothing," said Mr. Linton gloomily. "I hope to hear of one in a day or two; ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce
... HEAVEN AND EARTH. [Ps. 102:25] He has made all things,—the universe and all that it contains. The world did not come into being of itself or by chance, nor did it exist from eternity. God made it out of nothing. In the beginning He created the heaven and the earth. [Gen. 1:1, Ps 33:6, 9] They were at first a formless mass; [Gen. 1:2] but in six days God fashioned the formless mass into the world as it now exists. On these six days He created, ...
— An Explanation of Luther's Small Catechism • Joseph Stump
... treating my brother so badly—well, then, let things go on as they are.' But it was the pretension to a part in the name of Ormont which so violently offended the democratic aristocrat, and caused her to resent it as an assault on the family honour, by 'a woman springing up out of nothing'—a woman of no ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... to have conceived the possibility of an absolute creation, by means of which the gods, or one of them, should have evolved out of nothing all that exists: the creation was for them merely the setting in motion of pre-existing elements, and the creator only an organizer of the various materials floating in chaos. Popular fancy in different towns varied the names of the creators and the methods ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... truly as I have felt the wind blowing in my face. I cannot reason it out. There are a great many things I cannot reason out, but which I believe. I never could reason out the creation. I can see the world, but I cannot tell how God made it out of nothing. But almost every man will admit there was a ...
— The Way to God and How to Find It • Dwight Moody
... again with her talk of creation, as if creating things out of nothing was the commonest occurrence in the world. Glaudot stood up. "All right, ...
— A World Called Crimson • Darius John Granger
... the grass Or the spindrift of the sea, Out of nothing they were fashioned And to ...
— Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics • Bliss Carman
... to recount what mischief Scholastic Philosophy had brought upon the world; then tried to prove 'That Creation was impossible.' At this last point I stood out in opposition. 'But how can one create Something out of Nothing?' said he. 'That is not the question,' answered I; 'the question is, Whether such a Being as God can or cannot give existence to what has yet none.' He seemed embarrassed, and added, 'But the Universe is eternal.'—'You are in a circle,' said I; 'how will you get out of it?'—'I skip over it" said ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... of an army springing up out of nothing, the spectacle of the monumental work of military organization being pushed on to success in spite of mistakes, arrested the attention of ...
— Porto Rico - Its History, Products and Possibilities... • Arthur D. Hall
... "you did take care of mamma, and get up a dinner out of nothing, sure enough; and now we'll eat the dinner, which I am ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... glory and kingdom undivided. He then is in three persons one God, without beginning, and without end, eternal and everlasting, increate, immutable and incorporeal, invisible, infinite, incomprehensible, alone good and righteous, who created all things out of nothing, whether visible or invisible. First, he made the heavenly and invisible powers, countless multitudes, immaterial and bodiless, ministering spirits of the majesty of God. Afterward he created this visible world, heaven and earth and sea, which also he made glorious with ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... something which we can grasp. The public generally have an idea that a detective can make something out of nothing that the merest film of a clew is all that is necessary with which to build up a strong substantial edifice of facts. It is only the Messieurs La Coqs and 'Old Sleuths' of books and illustrated weeklies that are possessed with the second sight, and can hunt down the shrewdest criminals, without ...
— Jim Cummings • Frank Pinkerton
... go. He climbed aboard the stranded craft—a forlorn picture she made, lying on her side in the mud—and was surprised to find how much had been manufactured "out of nothing." Her seams, those which the sun had opened, were caulked neatly; her deck was clean and white; she was partially rigged, with new and old canvas and ropes; and to his landsman's eyes she looked almost fit for sea. But when ...
— The Woman-Haters • Joseph C. Lincoln
... and successful opponent was Athanasius, the writer of this biography) maintained that the Son of God was not co-equal and co-eternal with the Father, but created by Him out of nothing, and before the world. His opinions were condemned in the famous Council of Nicaea, ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... Look at him, he rises up grand and mysterious as a pyramid, the other is as insignificant as life. Look at the Jew's face, it is done with one tint; a synthesis, a dark red, and the face is as it were made out of nothing—hardly anything, and yet everything is said... You can't say where the picture begins or ends, the Jew surges out of the darkness like a vision. Look at his robe, a few folds, that is all, and yet he's completely dressed, and his hand, how large, how great... Don't you see, don't ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... first inclined to look upon this dove as being largely symbolical. So far as I could gather it had never been here before—at any rate no one could be found who had seen it here or in the neighbourhood, and it seemed obvious that its sudden emergence, as it were, out of nothing must have some ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, April 5, 1916 • Various
... administration, their bad pay and uncertain outlook, the elementary teachers of this country are amazingly efficient. And it is not simply that they are good under their existing conditions, but that this service has been made out of nothing whatever in the course of scarcely forty years. An educational system to cover an Empire is not a thing that can be got for the asking, it is not even to be got for the paying; it has to be grown; and in the beginning it is bound ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... see, everything you can dream of or think of, has been suggested to you by your surroundings, by nature. Man cannot rise above nature; below nature man cannot fall. Imagine, if you please, the creation of a single atom. Can any one here imagine the creation out of nothing of one atom? Can any one here imagine the destruction of one atom? Can you imagine an atom being changed to nothing? Can you imagine nothing being changed to an atom? There is not a solitary person here with an imagination strong enough to think either of the creation ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... rippleless ocean, towards which you march all day and get no nearer; the gorgeous momentary blaze of sunset colours in the west; the rustle of the wind through the short twilight when the west is a pure pale green and the east the darkest blue; and the downward swoop of the planets out of nothing to the earth. The inheritor of the other places dreamed himself back into his inheritance as he tramped to and fro, forgetful of his blindness and parched with desire as with a fever—until unexpectedly he heard the blackbirds and the swallows bustling and piping in the garden, and knew that ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... higher form of a life from a lower one is in accordance with our observation and experience. It is therefore proper to be believed. The attempt to get it from that which has absolutely no life is like trying to get something out of nothing. The millionth part of a farthing put out to interest at ten per cent, will in five hundred years become over a million pounds, and so long as we have any millionth of a millionth of the farthing to start ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... doll she was, made out of nothing more or less than a withered corn-cob, her face—such a queer little face—painted on it, and her hair and dress made very cleverly out of the corn shucks. Ann burst out laughing as she looked at the old doll, and turning to her new children, Marie-Louise and Angelina-Elfrida, which her ...
— The Wonderful Bed • Gertrude Knevels
... poppies on the dry summit of the mound take no heed of these, the populace, their subjects so numerous they cannot be numbered. A barren race they are, the proud poppies, lords of the July field, taking no deep root, but raising up a brilliant blazon of scarlet heraldry out of nothing. They are useless, they are bitter, they are allied to sleep and poison and everlasting night; yet they are forgiven because they are not commonplace. Nothing, no abundance of them, can ever make the poppies commonplace. There ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... have my man in the boat to watch through the window. What a singular being he is! I think he spends hours in that boat, and what he does I can't conceive. There it is, quietly anchored, and there is he in it. I never saw anybody but myself who could get up so much industry out of nothing. He has all his housework there, a broom and a duster, and I dare say he has a cooking-stove and a gridiron. He sits a little while, then he stoops down, then he goes to the other end. Sometimes he goes ashore in that absurd little tub, with a stick ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... like a rainbow, as in Fig. 10. Their edges constitute the cliff; the flat arch which they form with their backs is covered with pine forests and meadows, extending for three or four leagues in the direction of Sixt. Whether the whole mountain was called out of nothing into the form it possesses, or created first in the form of a level mass, and then actually bent and broken by external force, is quite irrelevant to our present purpose; but it is impossible to describe its form without appearing to imply the latter ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... ready to serve just as he is, couldn't be improved. There's absolutely nothing to be done. Mrs. Owl would get a divorce from him inside of a month, on the ground of insipidity. Her fine capabilities for making much out of nothing, would turn saffron for lack of use. Mr. Owl is the mate for her. To every man according to his taste; to every ...
— How to Cook Husbands • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... get so much fun out of nothing as you seem able to," said the brakeman, who was particularly down on tramps. "I reckon the super'll give you something to laugh about directly that won't seem so ...
— Cab and Caboose - The Story of a Railroad Boy • Kirk Munroe
... it for your sake? How could I want one for myself if there never was one? If a God had nothing to do with my making, why should I feel that nobody but God can set things right? Ah! but he must be such a God as I could imagine—altogether, absolutely true and good. If we came out of nothing, we could not invent the idea of a God—could we, Robert? Nothing would be our God. If we come from God, nothing is more natural, nothing so natural, as to want him, and when we haven't got him, to try to find him.—What if he should ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... divine substance, working everywhere in nature. But this brief story lets at rest all this inquiry. It informs us that matter was not eternal nor did it come into existence by chance, but it was created out of nothing by our eternal God. The story incidentally sets forth the majesty and glory of God and man's dependence upon and his obligation to God. It also explains the origin of sin and of all ...
— The Bible Period by Period - A Manual for the Study of the Bible by Periods • Josiah Blake Tidwell
... time of day, the climate, the period of the world it was meant to illustrate, or had not this character of wholeness in it. His eye also does justice to Rembrandt's fine and masterly effects. In the way in which that artist works something out of nothing, and transforms the stump of a tree, a common figure into an ideal object, by the gorgeous light and shade thrown upon it, he perceives an analogy to his own mode of investing the minute details of nature with an atmosphere ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... nothing but actual present, and their god—who will no more endure another god as his equal than a citizen's wife will admit a second woman to her husband's house—is said to have created the world out of nothing for no other purpose but to be worshipped ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Jane was the general favourite with children; her ways with them being so playful, and her long circumstantial stories so delightful. These were continued from time to time, and were begged for on all possible and impossible occasions; woven, as she proceeded, out of nothing but her own happy talent for invention. Ah! if but one of them could be recovered! And again, as I grew older, when the original seventeen years between our ages seemed to shrink to seven, or to nothing, it comes back to me now how strangely I missed ...
— Memoir of Jane Austen • James Edward Austen-Leigh
... thoughts at all, — the minds that were blank of intelligence, — the eyes that opened but to stare at the new teacher! What amount of culture, what distance of days and months, would bring something out of nothing! ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... energy de novo, cannot create it out of nothing, but it can and must draw upon the store of energy in which the earth floats as in a sea. When this energy or force is manifest through a living body, we call it vital force; when it is manifest through a mechanical contrivance, we call it mechanical force; when it is ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... blue sky; and all suddenly cut off above by one long horizontal line of dark grey cloud, which seems to hang there motionless, and yet is growing to windward, and dying to leeward, for ever rushing out of the invisible into sight, and into the invisible again, at railroad speed. Out of nothing the moor rises, and into nothing it ascends,—a great dark phantom between earth and sky, boding rain and howling tempest, and perhaps fearful wreck—for the groundswell moans and thunders on the beach behind us, louder and ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... most tiresome boy," said Polly. "You want to make mysteries out of nothing. I don't see that Flower is particularly passionate; she's a little bit sarcastic, and she likes to say nasty, scathing things, but you don't suppose I mind her! She'll soon come to her senses when she sees that ...
— Polly - A New-Fashioned Girl • L. T. Meade
... benevolent credulity, those superfluities to myself? Heaven only knows, my dear, dear, darling London, what I lose in you! O public charities! O public institutions! O banks that belie mathematical axioms and make lots out of nothing! O ancient constitution always to be questioned! O modern improvements that never answer! O speculations! O companies! O usury laws which guard against usurers, by making as many as possible! O churches in which no one profits, save the parson, and the old women that ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... as well he might be, after the things he'd heard, but he was entirely cold and collected. Gordon was hot, and bursting with imaginary wrongs. I was aghast at this perfectly foolish and unnecessary muddle that had suddenly arisen out of nothing. Sandy apologized to me with unimpeachable politeness for inadvertently overhearing, and then turned to Gordon and stiffly invited him to get into his car and ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster
... who are conscious of the limits of the realms of the natural and the religious, and are convinced of the possibility of a harmony between the two. For his casual utterances against a "creation" of single species always combine with the word creation the idea of that direct creation out of nothing, without intervening agencies, which is entirely correct for the idea of the first, origin of the universe, but which for the origin of the single formations within the universe is neither asked for by the ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... of senior major-general was a difficult one. To knit into an army such a mass of units, to create supplies out of nothing, to organize a commissary and means of communication, and maintain a firm front over a line of ten miles, these were the needs of the situation. We need scarcely marvel that Ward, old and enfeebled, with his hands tied by uncertain authority, could not meet ...
— The Siege of Boston • Allen French
... forces and qualities of material things. The idea in his consciousness is powerless save in so far as it is a guide to combinations and modifications which are latent in reality. The man who works with his hands does not create out of nothing a new totality. Even genius is conditioned by the elements he works with and upon. He can do nothing with his materials beyond what it is in themselves to yield. This sense of co-operation is strongly marked in the higher grades ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... off together yesterday, and stay away for such a time, leaving us to entertain your guests? You're busy with something that you don't want us to know about and I'd just like to find out what it is. It always irritates me when people make mysteries out of nothing.' ...
— The Adventure League • Hilda T. Skae
... creation on a miniature scale, and in this it differs from that of the engineer, which is constructive, or that of the scientist which is analytical; for the artist in a sense creates something out of nothing, and therefore starts from the stand-point of simple feeling, and not from that of a pre-existing necessity. This, by the hypothesis of the case, is true also of the Parent Mind, for at the stage where the initial movement of creation ...
— The Dore Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... inquire into the impenetrable mysteries of a being, whom you consider inconceivable to the human mind? You are the blasphemers, when you imagine that a being, perfect according to you, could be guilty of such cruelty towards creatures whom he has made out of nothing. Confess, your ignorance of a creating God; and cease meddling with mysteries, which ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... just such a chance as the old magician had been waiting for; so the night before the hunting-party returned he climbed the walls of the garden, and so came to the wonderful palace that the soldier had built out of nothing at all, and there stood three men keeping guard so that ...
— Twilight Land • Howard Pyle
... observer. He may then realize something of the interest which attaches to the explanation of this phenomenon—may even experience a sort of mental vertigo, as if he had witnessed the evolution of a world out of nothing. Owing to the paucity of the facts to be observed, the finesse requisite for the observation, and the intellectual dexterity needed to retain such minute circumstances before the mind long enough to think about them, the problem is one of the most ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... though it take not away the being of a God, yet, since it denies one and the first great piece of his workmanship, the creation, let us consider it a little. Matter must be allowed eternal: Why? because you cannot conceive how it can be made out of nothing: why do you not also think yourself eternal? You will answer, perhaps, Because, about twenty or forty years since, you began to be. But if I ask you, what that YOU is, which began then to be, you ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke
... our point and the horses were gained. When we entered the office it was positively declared there were no horses to be had, and it was a little odd that two troikas and six horses, could be produced out of nothing, and each of them at the end of a long talk. I asked an explanation of the mystery, but was told it was a Russian peculiarity that ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... thing is it that thou, who art dust and nothingness, yieldest thyself to man for God's sake, when I, the Almighty and the Most High, who created all things out of nothing, subjected Myself to man for thy sake? I became the most humble and despised of men, that by My humility thou mightest overcome thy pride. Learn to obey, O dust! Learn to humble thyself, O earth and clay, and to bow thyself beneath the feet of all. Learn to crush thy passions, and to yield thyself ...
— The Imitation of Christ • Thomas a Kempis
... make tragedies out of nothing," said Hyacinth, struggling to disguise hysterical tears with airy laughter. "But I am right glad all the same that you are come; for this gentleman has put a scurvy trick upon me, and brought me here on pretence of a gay ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... the further Thomistic teaching that sanctifying grace is not directly created by God, but drawn (educta) from the potentia obedientialis of the soul.(989) Not even the Scotists, though they held grace to be created out of nothing(990) claimed that ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... speeches all they like, but they can't put it out. Because why? Well, because this life thing is going on, and competition is the only way it can get on. Call it Nature if you want to. Nature built star dust out of nothing, and built us out of star dust, but she ain't through; she's still building. Old Evolution is still evoluting, and her only tool is competition, the same under the earth and on the earth, the same out in the sky as ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... a sort of deliberately exaggerated record—vision rather than record—of the disillusions of a country sojourn, as they affect the disordered nerves of a town nevrose. The narrative is punctuated by nightmares, marvellously woven out of nothing, and with no psychological value—the human part of the book being a sort of picturesque pathology at best, the representation of a series of states of nerves, sharpened by the tragic ennui of the country. There is a cat which becomes ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... the worthiest of their company; to the man namely, who, only a few days since, had entered this empty palace and like a second Deucalion had raised up illustrious artists, such as he then saw around him in great numbers, and skilled workmen by hundreds, not out of plastic stone but out of nothing. And then—while declaring that he understood the use of the hammer and chisel better than that of the tongue, and that he had never studied the art of making speeches—he expressed his wish that Pontius would lead the revel, in ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Christian fiction was resolved into a psychological law, regulated by a definite law of suggestion, of which plausible instances were traced. The gospel history was regarded to be partly a creation out of nothing, partly an adaptation of real facts to preconceived ideas. This same philosophy, which thus contributed to the critical or destructive side of the theory, also furnished the reconstructive. The facts in Christianity ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... man's equal: perhaps she may have thought herself to be superior to him—more refined, of better material. She forgot her place, and ignored her sphere, and lost all. She was not created as things were, out of nothing. She was meant to be something better than a thing; and she must be something better than a thing, or she is nothing. She was not formed as Adam was, out of the dust of the earth. Had she been, perhaps she would not have disliked dust so terribly. She is a part of man's ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton
... "Out of nothing? That would not be simple at all, and if any one could prove it he would make a sensation ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... it would appear, the grand point, after all constitutional improvements, and such wagging of wigs in Westminster as there has been, is precisely what it was before any constitution was yet heard of, or the first official wig had budded out of nothing: namely, to ascertain what the truth of your question, in Nature, really is! Verily so. In this time and place, as in all past and in all future times and places. To-day in St. Stephen's, where constitutional, philanthropical, and ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... can be out of nothing in the whole world, quoth my uncle Toby, in the simplicity of his heart,—but Modesty.—My sister, I dare say, added he, does not care to let a man come so near her.... I will not say whether my uncle Toby had completed ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... one, after such a warning, should rely implicitly on the evidence a priori of such propositions as these, that matter can not think; that space, or extension, is infinite; that nothing can be made out of nothing (ex nihilo nihil fit). Whether these propositions are true or not this is not the place to determine, nor even whether the questions are soluble by the human faculties. But such doctrines are no more self-evident ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... the "Fallacies of Hope"—for it is quite hopeless to make out, the sun smoking his cigar of colour, and exhaling earth's humid bubbles; yet we do see a great number of "bubble" heads, scratchy things, in red wigs, rolling and floating out of nothing into nothing. There must indeed have been very wondrous giants in those days; for here is an enormous leg, far beyond the "ex pede Herculem," rising up some leagues off far bigger than whole figures close at hand. But we learn the wonderful fact, that the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... in a word, only bodies (corps) and what concerns them, all that which immediately proceeds from supreme power is incomprehensible to us, as it itself [i.e., supreme power] is to our minds. To create, or to make anything out of nothing, this is an idea we cannot conceive of, for the reason that in all that we can know, we do not find any model which represents it. GOD alone, then, can create, while nature can only produce. We must suppose that, in his creations, the Divinity is not restricted to the ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... intervenes in the flux, but evolution is due to an absolute Effort which exists in vacuo and is simplicity itself; and this Effort, without having an idea of what it pursues, nevertheless produces it out of nothing. ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... conspicuous talent for detail, unlimited capacity for work, genius for creating something out of nothing, marshalled for more active service than now. He withheld his personal supervision from nothing; planning forts, preparing codes of tactics, organizing a commissariat department, drafting bills for Congress, advising M'Henry upon every point which puzzled that unfinished statesman, ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... and good fellows of literature;—fellows of inexhaustible resources, who carry their wits literally at their fingers' ends;—who can do more than extract sunbeams from cucumbers; for they can make up thrilling facts out of nothing;—who can thread their way through a crowd where a tapeworm would be squeezed to death;—whose writing desk is usually another man's back; and who sketch out a much better speech between an orator's shoulder blades than he is ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... intimate side of their exceptional lives is of decided interest to us. This I think is especially true where the noted ones are among our public entertainers, the player-folk, who bring so much joy and happiness into the world out of nothing—creators of innocent pleasure. ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... of a Creator chemical affinities and mechanical laws have been substituted, but aided by these the author has failed to produce a world such as we find it. Hence we are again driven upon the old tradition, the old sacred authority, that the world was created out of nothing; and this is as easy to comprehend as the solution of the Vestiges, that it sprang from that which is certainly next to nothing—a heated ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... We should be forsaking the lines of nature were we to imagine for a moment that the new creature was to be formed out of nothing. Nothing can be made out of nothing. Matter is uncreatable and indestructible; Nature and man can only form and transform. Hence when a new animal is made, no new clay is made. Life merely enters into already existing matter, assimilates more of the same sort and ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond
... does not tell us. Whether he created (as doubtless he could have done if he chose) this world suddenly out of nothing, full grown and complete; or whether he created it (as he creates you and me, and all living and growing things now) out of things which had been before it—that the ...
— The Gospel of the Pentateuch • Charles Kingsley
... or a Scandinavian worker in iron, or an old French worker in thread, could produce indeed beautiful design out of nothing but groups of knots and spirals: but you, when you are rightly educated, may render your knots and spirals infinitely more interesting by making them suggestive of natural forms, and rich in ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... did not assume it into unity of person. Wherefore, after the words quoted above, Augustine adds: "Just as it behooved the Son of God not to deceive men, so it behooved the Holy Ghost not to deceive. But it was easy for Almighty God, who created all creatures out of nothing, to frame the body of a real dove without the help of other doves, just as it was easy for Him to form a true body in Mary's womb without the seed of a man: since the corporeal creature obeys its Lord's command and will, ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... affairs. He did not represent the will of his country, for his country had no will. His country really did not exist. Bolivar created it. He was obeying no commands but those of his conscience. He was making something out of nothing, and in his campaigns it was the flash of genius which led him ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... my comprehension altogether out of nothing," observed Spurey. "There's something very queer in the wind. I wonder where the corporal has ...
— Snarley-yow - or The Dog Fiend • Frederick Marryat
... discussed that which we know as things: it remains that I should speak of that which we know as truths. For example, when we think that it is impossible to make anything out of nothing, we do not imagine that this proposition is a thing which exists, or a property of something, but we take it for a certain eternal truth, which has its seat in the mind (pensee), and is called a common notion or an axiom. ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... sensation he knew he was creating among his employes, he moved about, accompanied by his manager, making last suggestions, giving final instructions, and radiating fond, farewell glances at all the loved details of the business he had built out of nothing. ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... way of approach is different. It seeks to draw out by a process of rational argument what is involved in the outer or inner facts that are present to consciousness. It does not claim the power to make bricks without clay, to construct its conclusions out of nothing. Its only legitimate field is that of interpreting experience. There have always been men who were religious because they could not help being religious, because a Universe without God seemed to them ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... able to prove it: and as weakly that the world was eternal; that dispute much troubled the pen of the philosophers, but Moses decided that question, and all is salved with the new term of a creation,—that is, a production of some- thing out of nothing. And what is that?—whatsoever is opposite to something; or, more exactly, that which is truly contrary unto God: for he only is; all others have an existence with dependency, and are something but by a distinction. ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... thinking of Jew and Mohammedan but really transformed it from religious and ethical discussions into metaphysical systems. In the Bible and similarly in the Koran we have a purely personal view of God and the world. God is a person, he creates the world—out of nothing to be sure—but nevertheless he is thought of doing it in the manner in which a person does such things with a will and a purpose in time and place. He puts a soul into man and communicates to him laws and prohibitions. Man must obey these laws because they are the will of God ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... perceived how vastly differed her homely suit and unstudied contour—painfully unstudied to fastidious eyes—from Ethelberta's well-arranged draperies, even from Picotee's clever bits of ribbon, by which she made herself look pretty out of nothing at all. Yet this negligence was his sister's essence; without it she would have been a spoilt product. She had no outer world, and her rusty black was as appropriate to Faith's unseen courses as were Ethelberta's correct lights and shades to her ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... closed, already he believes in us: even before his birth, he has given himself to man. But the word "friend" does not exactly depict his affectionate worship. He loves us and reveres us as though we had drawn him out of nothing. He is, before all, our creature full of gratitude and more devoted than the apple of our eye. He is our intimate and impassioned slave, whom nothing discourages, whom nothing repels, whose ardent ...
— Our Friend the Dog • Maurice Maeterlinck
... for all emergencies, my lord; it is wonderful, your foresight; but I conceive that you are making something out of nothing. The diplomatic brain is ...
— Princess Maritza • Percy Brebner
... about poor Smith? I knew him before Clayton ever got hold of him, when the chap hadn't a halfpenny to fly with, but was a most ordacious fellow at speculating and inventions, and was always up to something new. One day he had a plan for making moist sugar out of bricks—then soap out of nothing—and sweet oil out of stones. At last Clayton hears of him, and hooks him up, gets him to the chapel; first converts him, and then goes partners with him in the spekylations—let's him have as much money as he asks for, and because soap doesn't ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... incorporated a metaphysic, borrowed in great part from Greek philosophy, in great part from the Hebrew traditions. It possessed ideas on the origin of matter, and whilst maintaining that God was eternal, denied that matter was, and asserted that God created it out of nothing. It had theories on the essence of God, and saw Him in three Persons, or hypostases, one aspect of God as power, another as love, and the other as intelligence. It presented theories on the incarnation ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... faith in the recuperative forces of his country when its fortunes were at their lowest ebb. With buoyancy and confidence he set himself the task of rescuing his fellow-countrymen when it looked as hopeless as that of Xenophon at Cunaxa. He created an army out of nothing, induced his men by argument, suasion, and example to shake off the virus of indiscipline and sacrifice their individual judgment and will to the well-being of their fellows. He enjoined nothing ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... story as expounded by Mark Twain, Artemus Ward, and Robert J. Burdette, is purely American. Artemus Ward could get laughs out of nothing, by mixing the absurd and the unexpected, and then backing the combination with a solemn face and earnest manner. For instance, he was fond of such incongruous statements as: "I once knew a man in New Zealand who hadn't a tooth in his ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... nothing like sich an edication. It does everything for a man, and he larns to make everything out of nothing. I could make my bread where these same Indians wouldn't find the skin of a hoe-cake; and in these woods, or in the middle of the sea, t'ant anything for me to say I can always fish up some notion that will sell ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... There is nothing I enjoy more than planning and contriving, and making a great deal out of nothing at all. I've had a grand turn out of my boxes and cupboards, and brought to light some forgotten treasures which will come in most usefully just now. It reminds me of the time before my own marriage, when I sat stitching dreams of bliss into every seam, and indeed they ...
— More About Peggy • Mrs G. de Horne Vaizey
... England and would come to it and ask it for drafts on London, which, by remitting this bill to be sold in London, it would be able to supply. International finance is so often regarded as a machinery by which paper wealth is manufactured out of nothing, that it is very important to remember that all this paper wealth only acquires value by being ultimately based on something that is grown or made and wanted to keep people alive or comfortable, or at least happy in the belief that they have got something that they thought they wanted, or which ...
— International Finance • Hartley Withers
... Reckoning, and at last leaving not only his own Children, but possibly those of other People, by his Means, in starving Circumstances; while a Fellow, whom one would scarce suspect to have a humane Soul, shall perhaps raise a vast Estate out of Nothing, and be the Founder of a Family capable of being very considerable in their Country, and doing many illustrious Services to it. That this Observation is just, Experience has put beyond all Dispute. ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... be made better and wiser than the sum of their goodness and wisdom. To expect that men who do not honorably and intelligently conduct their private affairs will honorably and intelligently conduct the affairs of the community is to be a fool. We are told that out of nothing God made the Heavens and the earth; but out of nothing God never did and man never can, make a public sense of honor and a public conscience. Miracles are now performed but one day of the year—the twenty-ninth of February; and on leap year God ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... tone again steady and clear,—"I must go home to see about getting up a dinner. I am the greatest hand at making something out of nothing, aunt Miriam, that ever you saw. There is nothing like practice. I only wish the man uncle Orrin talks about would come along once ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... letters of which the originals shall never leave our hands, yet which shall stand written in a distant place in our own characters, indisputably signed by us with our own names. We apparently produce out of nothing but the whirling of a huge bobbin of wire any power we may wish, and send it over a thin wire to where we wish to use it, though every adult can remember when the difficulty of distance, in the propelling of machinery, was thought to have been solved to the satisfaction of every reasonable man ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... intellectual climate, due to innumerable influences, that make the thought of a past generation seem as foreign to its successor as if it were the expression of a different race of men. The theological machinery that spoke so livingly to our ancestors, with its finite age of the world, its creation out of nothing, its juridical morality and eschatology, its relish for rewards and punishments, its treatment of God as an external contriver, an 'intelligent and moral governor,' sounds as odd to most of us as if it were some outlandish savage religion. ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... and the principle of evolution is put aside in favour of the fiat of creation. Yet for all this the aim of the narrator is not mainly a religious one. Had he only meant to say that God made the world out of nothing, and made it good, he could have said so in simpler words, and at the same time more distinctly. There is no doubt that he means to describe the actual course of the genesis of the world, and to be true to nature in doing so; he means to give a cosmogonic theory. Whoever ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... wealthy country should be other than ashamed to continue to allow its citizens to profit by the treatment freely given at the Institute without contributing to its support. Opposition to the proposals which your Lordship sanctions would be equally inconceivable if it arose out of nothing but the facts of the case thus presented. But the opposition which, as I see from the English papers, is threatened has really for the most part nothing to do either with M. Pasteur's merits or with the efficacy of his method of treating hydrophobia. It proceeds ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... wishing we had got the Camel here, though he would be no good without the galley and his tools. Not a bad chap to have, though, Mr Poole, if we was to land in a sort of Robinson Crusoe island. There's worse messmates at a time like that than a chap as can knock up decent wittles out of nothing; make a good pot of soup out of a flannel-shirt and an old shoe, and roast meat out of them knobs and things like cork-blocks as you find growing on trees. Some of them cookie chaps too, like the Camel, are precious keen about the nose, long-headed and knowing. ...
— Fitz the Filibuster • George Manville Fenn
... the law could not stop at the sheriff's office. It rubbed shoulders with big contracts and big financial operations of all sorts. The city was being built within a few years out of nothing by a busy, careless, and shifting population. Money was still easy, people could and did pay high taxes without a thought, for they would rather pay well to be let alone than be bothered with public affairs. Like hyenas to a kill, the public contractors gathered. Immense ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... whene'er They rode together in the lanes, and paused, Stopping their horses, when the day was hot, In the shadow of a tree, to watch the clouds, Ruffled in drifting on the jagged rocks That topped the mountains,—when she sat by him, Withdrawn at even while the summer stars Came starting out of nothing, as new made, She felt a little trouble, and a wish That he would yet keep silence, and he did. That one reserve he would not touch, ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... noon of the fourth day of Michael's journey when he saw in the distance a cavalcade of camels riding towards him. It had emerged out of nothing; suddenly it became clearer and clearer. Was it mirage? It was still so distant that it might ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... best possible condition. But we have not yet mentioned the great crowning work of Ministers—the Queen's speech on the Prorogation of the Parliament last week. What an admirable illustration it was of that profound logical deduction—that, out of nothing comes nothing! Yet it was deduction—that, out of nothing comes nothing! Yet it was not altogether without design, and though some sneering critics have called the old song—the burthen of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... this detail out of nothing in the world but pure fancy and the Jack of Diamonds, but as it happened, they had touched an open wound. It was an exact description of a certain rich young man in the neighboring city, who loaded Miss Jellings with favors, and whom Mr. Gilroy detested from the ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
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