"Nullity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... But there is such a thing as a mean infinity, a base and slavish eternity. It is amusing to notice that many of the moderns, whether sceptics or mystics, have taken as their sign a certain eastern symbol, which is the very symbol of this ultimate nullity. When they wish to represent eternity, they represent it by a serpent with his tail in his mouth. There is a startling sarcasm in the image of that very unsatisfactory meal. The eternity of the material fatalists, the eternity of the eastern pessimists, the eternity of the supercilious theosophists ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... Dunbar. But he was still a married man, having wedded Lord Huntly's sister fourteen months before. And now in May, came in the new consistorial jurisdiction of the Archbishop, for the only act which that prelate ever performed under it was to confirm a sentence of nullity of this very marriage, and that on the ground that Bothwell and his wife being too nearly related, had not procured a Papal dispensation (the Papal dispensation having not only been procured before ...
— John Knox • A. Taylor Innes
... complete, the full price paid and delivery of possession made. But in some cases this was a mere conventional statement, and both payment and delivery were delayed. There was to be no return of the goods, no turning back from the bargain; the pleading of a suit of nullity of sale is expressly barred. It is of interest to notice who were regarded as competent, or likely to take action to recover the property. Sons, grandsons, brothers, brothers' sons, are all named. The enumeration clearly included females of the same nearness of ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts and Letters • C. H. W. Johns
... found herself a nullity at the court of Francois I. Her young husband was in love with Diane de Poitiers, who certainly, in the matter of birth, could rival Catherine, and was far more of a great lady than the little Florentine. The daughter of the Medici was ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... man to work, with the gloriously disquieting prospect before him that in so many months, weeks, days, he should meet his divinity? The phantoms of his imagination faded to insignificance, and then to utter nullity, beside the woman of flesh and blood, the one real object in a world of shadows. On March 17th, 1846, he started on his journey to Rome, and everything became a blank, except the intoxicating thought that each hour diminished the distance between him ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... declaring Don John to be no longer governor or stadtholder of the Netherlands. The Prince of Orange was appointed lieutenant general for Mathias, and the actual power of the latter was reduced to a nullity, but he was installed at Brussels with ...
— By Pike and Dyke: A Tale of the Rise of the Dutch Republic • G.A. Henty
... I had traced the secret to its ultimate result,—and that result was the nail. It had, I say, in every respect, the appearance of its fellow in the other window; but this fact was an absolute nullity (conclusive us it might seem to be) when compared with the consideration that here, at this point, terminated the clew. 'There must be something wrong,' I said, 'about the nail.' I touched it; and the head, with about a quarter ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... fact that Caesar brought good news, King Frederic gave his consent to the proposed union; so the marriage of Sforza and Lucrezia was dissolved on a pretext of nullity. Then Frederic authorised the exhumation of D'jem's body, which, it will be remembered, was ...
— The Borgias - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... hearth, she looked so gentle, sweet, and lovely. No longer wild and shy, or gayly mischievous and watchful, but calm-eyed, firm-lipped, gravely courteous; intent upon her father's face, and banishing not into shadow so much as absolute nullity any one who dreamed that he ever filled a pitcher for her, or fed her with grouse and partridge, and committed the incredible ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... Supreme Court, on a reference to them, settled the controversy by deciding that the resignation was an invalid act, and that Mr. Hastings was still in the legal possession of his place, which had been actually filled up in England. It was extraordinary that the nullity of this resignation should not have been discovered in England, where the act authorizing the resignation then was, where the agent was personally present, where the witnesses were examined, and where ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VIII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... advocate; the second, a Girondin by early associations, but a trimmer by instinct, and therefore easily gained over by Sieyes; while the recommendation of the third, Moulin, seem to have been his political nullity and some third-rate military services in the Vendean war. Yet the Directory of Prairial was not devoid of a spasmodic energy, which served to throw back the invaders of France. Bernadotte, the fiery Gascon, ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... with the second—we shall be surprised at now finding that admirable which we before condemned—that damnable which we had previously so much admired. It follows from all this that the ultimate, aggregate, or absolute effect of even the best epic under the sun, is a nullity—and this is ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... beginning of the quarrel between the Pope and the Emperor. Pius VII. would not yield; but Napoleon found greater servility in the metropolitan officialty of Paris; and October 6, 1806, he secured a sentence pronouncing the nullity of his brother Jerome's ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... after the abdication of Napoleon, was merely a superfetation. The departure of those peers, who formed part of the army, completed its reduction to an absolute nullity. Without patriotism, without energy, it confined itself to sanctioning with an ill grace the measures adopted by the representatives. M. Thibaudeau, M. de Segur, M. de Bassano, and a few others, ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. II • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... not logically met and demonstrated, to his own satisfaction, the nullity of the religious dogmas on which New England faith was based? There could be no such inner life, he said to himself,—he had demonstrated it as an absurdity. What was it, then,—this charm, so subtile ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... declaration of the nature of the Godhead and the relations of a philosophy of history and an argument against idolatry. The glories of Greek art were around him; the statues of Pallas Athene and many more fair creations looked down on the little Jew who dared to proclaim their nullity ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... even of the purest Spanish stock; officials who regard the colony as a mine to be worked, not a trust to be administered; forced dependence upon the mother country for manufactures, even for produce, so far as duties can effect it; self-government stifled; representation in the Cortes denied or a nullity; a civil service unprogressive, ignorant, sometimes corrupt—compare these handicaps with the growth, the prosperity, the independence, above all, the decent and orderly administration, of the colonies of England. One of the wonderful things ...
— Porto Rico - Its History, Products and Possibilities... • Arthur D. Hall
... yearning I feel towards those lonely rocks is indescribably acute. This town, that is usually so full of wild human interest, seems in my present mood a tawdry medley of all that is crudest in modern life. The nullity of the rich and the squalor of the poor give me the same pang of wondering disgust; yet the islands are fading already and I can hardly realise that the smell of the seaweed and the drone of the Atlantic are ...
— The Aran Islands • John M. Synge
... Bayne found the fire newly alight in the hall, burning with that spare, clear brilliancy that the recent removal of ashes imparts to a wood fire. All the world was still beclouded with mists, and the windows and doors looked forth on a blank white nullity—as inexpressive, as enigmatical, as the unwritten page of the unformulated future itself. The present seemed eliminated; he stood as it were in the atmosphere of other days. But whither had blown the incense ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... to politicians, but from its own point of view, a point of view which it cannot avoid taking up, it is absolutely right. What is a politician? He is a man who, in respect of his personal opinions, is a nullity, in respect of education a mediocrity; he shares the general sentiments and passions of the crowds, his sole occupation is politics, and if that career were closed to him he would die of starvation. He is precisely the thing of which democracy has need. ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... and certainly not remarkable for that spirit of charity or toleration upon which he afterwards founded his own government, and which now, in after ages, constitutes his brightest title to renown. The first of these opinions was that the royal charter to the Colony of Massachusetts was a nullity, because the King of England had no right to grant lands in foreign countries, which belonged of right to their native inhabitants. This opinion struck directly at all right of property held under the authority of the royal charter, and, followed to its logical conclusions, ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... absolute; the husband could even put his wife to death without a public trial. But the world was progressing, and that during the first three centuries after Christ the power of the husband was reduced in practice to absolute nullity I shall make clear in the following pages. I shall, accordingly, first investigate the rights of the wife over her dowry, that is, the right ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker
... of the State of Georgia, under which the plaintiff in error was prosecuted, is consequently void, and the judgment a nullity. Can this ...
— Opinion of the Supreme Court of the United States, at January Term, 1832, Delivered by Mr. Chief Justice Marshall in the Case of Samuel A. Worcester, Plaintiff in Error, versus the State of Georgia • John Marshall
... which had the honey of probability in it, and be the more eager because their enjoyment would end with sunset. Our impulses, our spiritual activities, no more adjust themselves to the idea of their future nullity, than the beating of our heart, or the irritability of ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... In that report he says—"The offspring of always careless, generally intemperate, and oftentimes dishonest parents, they never see the inside of a school-room, and so far as our excellent system of public education is concerned, it is to them a nullity." It appears that, at that time, in 12 wards of the city, there were 2,955 of these children, of whom two-thirds were females between the ages of 8 and 16. I am informed, also, by the Chief of Police, that 100 per cent. should now be added to this estimate; not ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... But there are duodecim impedimenta, twelve impediments, as we call them, all which do not dirimere contractum, but irritum reddere matrimonium, as we say in the canon-law, not take away the bond, but cause a nullity therein. ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson
... visited seven of their towns, and then passed westward to those of the people whom Champlain calls the Cheveax Releves, and whom he commends for neatness and ingenuity no less than he condemns them for the nullity of their summer attire. As the strangers passed from town to town, their arrival was everywhere the signal of festivity. Champlain exchanged pledges of amity with his hosts, and urged them to come down with the Hurons to the ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... in others, stood outside the currents of his age. His conception of marriage made no more impression on contemporary life than his Paradise Lost. Even his own Puritan party who had passed the Act of 1653 had strangely failed to transfer divorce and nullity cases to the temporal courts, which would at least have been a step on the right road. The Puritan influence was transferred to America and constituted the leaven which still works in producing the liberal though too minutely detailed divorce laws of many States. The ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... do it; he was a mere passive instrument in the hands of others to be used at their discretion. Though living, he was, dead as to all voluntary agency; though moving amidst the creation with an erect form, and with the shape and semblance of a human being, he was a nullity as ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... upon such an amendment as this. It is well known to the Conference that great difficulties have been found to exist in carrying into effect this provision of the Constitution. So far as the slave States are concerned, it is a perfect nullity. Unless it is amended it may as well be stricken from the instrument. I believe the tenor of the decisions at the North has been to permit the executive upon whom the requisition is made, to determine whether ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden
... at now finding that admirable which we before condemned—that damnable which we had previously so much admired. It follows from all this that the ultimate, aggregate, or absolute effect of even the best epic under the sun is a nullity;—and ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... which Scott was indeed amply provided, but which he did not exhibit, and had no call to exhibit, here. If the personages will play their parts, that is enough. And they all play them very well here, though the hero and heroine do certainly exhibit something of that curious nullity which has been objected to the heroes nearly always, the heroines too frequently, of the ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... salted? This it is which condemns to a swift, and what the poem represents as a just, abolishment from earth the mother who in Ivan Ivanovitch has given her children to the wolves, and has thereby proved the complete nullity of her womanhood. For her there is no possible redemption; she must cease to cumber the ground. Ivan acts merely as the instinctive doomsman of Nature or of God, and the old village Pope, who, as the veil of life grows thin, is feeling after the law above human law, ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... sympathy of his feminine ideal, so on the other hand no worldly success of any kind can compensate for its absence. All particular causes of happiness or misery are swallowed up and sink into insignificance and nullity compared with this: this present, they disappear: this absent, each alone is sufficient to wreck the soul, fluttering about without rudder or ballast on the waves of the world. Duality is the root, out of which alone, for mortals, happiness can spring. And the old Hindoo mythology, ...
— The Substance of a Dream • F. W. Bain
... necessarily follow, either that justice is not the same thing in America as in Britain, or else that the British Parliament pay less regard to it here than there. But, that we do not point out to his Majesty the injustice of these acts, with intent to rest on that principle the cause of their nullity; but to show that experience confirms the propriety of those political principles, which exempt us from the jurisdiction of the British Parliament. The true ground on which we declare these acts void, is, that the British Parliament has ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... passed the Alps or crossed the sea. The original stock being nearly everywhere extinct, the races have become degenerated amidst corruption and ignorance. The descendants of our noble families at Genoa, at Naples, at Venice, and at Rome, are, for the most part specimens of absolute intellectual nullity. Almost every thing that has worked its difficult way in art, in literature, or ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... an individual struggle, but a party contest between the ins and outs. The question was, whether the withering influence of the overseers, the domination of the churchwardens, and the blighting despotism of the vestry-clerk, should be allowed to render the election of beadle a form—a nullity: whether they should impose a vestry-elected beadle on the parish, to do their bidding and forward their views, or whether the parishioners, fearlessly asserting their undoubted rights, should elect an ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... time." Greatly to the joy of Belleisle; infinitely to the chagrin of her Hungarian Majesty,—who declared it a crying injustice (though I believe legally done in every point); and by and by, even made it a plea of Nullity, destructive to the Election altogether, when her Hungarian Majesty's affairs looked up again, and the world would listen to Austrian sophistries and obstinacies. This was an essential service from Kur-Sachsen. [Began, indistinctly, "in ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... court to prove that the Nabob had no power or authority at all; but what is very singular in it, and which I recommend to the particular notice of your Lordships, when you are scrutinizing this matter, is, that there is not a single point stated, to prove the nullity of this Nabob's authority, that was not Mr. Hastings's on particular act. Well, the Governor-General swears; the judge of the court refers to him in his decision; he builds and bottoms it upon the Governor-General's affidavit;—he swears, I say, that the Council, by their own authority, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke
... took part in the attack on Fort Fisher, one of the strongest of forts, which, standing at the entrance of Cape Fear river, was so efficient a protection to Wilmington that the city became the chief port in the Confederacy for blockade runners. Indeed, its blockade was a nullity, despite the most determined efforts of the Union fleet to keep it closed. The Confederate cruisers advertised their regular days for departure, and they ran upon schedule time, even women and children taking ...
— Dewey and Other Naval Commanders • Edward S. Ellis
... of our own country, though we labour under a variety of partial and oppressive laws, we have an evident proof of the nullity of regal interference, as the king's name is confessedly a mere fiction, and justice is known to be most equitably administered when the judges are ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... imposed and no penalties can be made to follow attempts to violate the principles of equity, except the possible inconvenience of changing from one creamery to another. The straight and honorable patron is powerless; the owner of the creamery is powerless; and the co-operative element is rendered a nullity. ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 1, January 5, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... acquaintance with the possibilities of sciatica as an agent destructive of moral fibre was further increased. Constance had no force at all to resist its activity. The sweetness of her resignation seemed to melt into nullity. She held to it that the doctor could ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... remarkable,' he continued, 'that women whose influence is generally greatest under despotisms, have none now. They have lost it, partly in consequence of the gross vulgarity of our dominant passions, and partly from their own nullity. They are like London houses, all built and furnished on exactly the same model, and that a most uninteresting one. Whether a girl is bred up at home or in a convent, she has the same masters, gets a smattering of the same accomplishments, reads ...
— Correspondence & Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859, Vol. 2 • Alexis de Tocqueville
... by the majority of his neighbors in Garum. Mr. Pullet had bought the box, to begin with, and he understood winding it up, and knew which tune it was going to play beforehand; altogether the possession of this unique "piece of music" was a proof that Mr. Pullet's character was not of that entire nullity which might otherwise have been attributed to it. But uncle Pullet, when entreated to exhibit his accomplishment, never depreciated it by a too-ready consent. "We'll see about it," was the answer he always gave, ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... his life had those lapses in it which some of his followers deny; and he regarded him on the aesthetical side as essentially commonplace, and as probably chosen for his prophetic function just because of his imaginative nullity: his tremendous revelations could be the more distinctly and unmistakably inscribed upon an intelligence of that sort, which alone could render again a strictly literal report ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Irish affairs, thinks that Government will probably be under the necessity of adopting strong coercive measures there; but whether they are adopted, or a temporary policy of expedients persisted in, nobody is there fit to advise what is requisite. The Duke of Northumberland is an absolute nullity, a bore beyond all bores, and, in spite of his desire to spend money and be affable, very unpopular. The Duchess complains of it and can't imagine why, for they do all they can to be liked, ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... infantry on board had gone ashore at St. Helena, some 180 miles from Cape Town. Fortunately the men were rescued from the transport, but their chargers were all lost. This was a terrible blow, for at the time cavalry was almost a nullity, and operations were somewhat suspended, if not entirely crippled, owing to the lack of that arm. Indeed, Lord Methuen's brilliant operations on the Orange River had all been heavily handicapped owing to the impossibility of pushing his victories home, and at this time the one ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) - From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, - 15th Dec. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... Pyrotists could not subvert the proofs of the accusation because they could not know what they were, 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 ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... there will be satirists or torture-chambers.[12] Yet, though the self-complacent magistrate has been the butt of the ages, Aristophanes and Shakespeare, and perhaps Flaubert, have alone revealed his essential nullity, because they alone have looked for something essential beneath the accidental. Nothing could be simpler than the character of Polonius; nothing could be more subtle. A rap here, a stab there, and the soul of a minister is exposed. We have come to see, we scarcely know how, that, if he ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... have too frequently made use of the suppliant humble tone of requisition in applications to the states, when they had a right to assert their imperial dignity, and command obedience. Be that as it may, requisitions are a perfect nullity, where thirteen sovereign, independent, disunited states, are in the habit of discussing, and refusing or complying with them at their option. Requisitions are actually little better than a jest and a bye-word throughout the ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 4 (of 5) • John Marshall
... Congress have too frequently made use of the suppliant, humble tone of requisition in application to the states, when they had a right to assert their imperial dignity and command obedience. Be that as it may, requisitions are a perfect nullity when thirteen sovereign, independent, disunited states, are in the habit of discussing and refusing compliance with them at their option. Requisitions are actually little better than a jest and a by-word throughout the land. ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... spite of my protests is to make it retroactive, and to violate this very law itself. Every day you have to reverse a decision because of some formal error. But there is not a single one of your laws that is not tainted with nullity, and the most monstrous nullity of all, the very hypothesis of the law. Soufflard, Lacenaire, all the scoundrels whom you send to the scaffold turn in their graves and accuse you of judicial forgery. What answer can you ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff
... emerge from this state of nullity. You owe it to yourself, you owe it to me, you owe it to your country, you owe it to the ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... bring out the force of these words by dealing first with that emphatic threefold proclamation of the nullity of all externalism; and then with the singular variations in the triple statement of what is essential, viz. spiritual conduct ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... route to lead their feet to the Creator, the Assyrians turned their eyes toward the stars, which they contemplated without the power of attaining them. The Guebers have conserved the same belief to our days. In their nullity and spiritual blindness, men are incapable of conceiving the invisible spiritual bond which unites them to the great Divinity, and this explains why they have always sought for palpable things, which were in the domain of the senses, ...
— The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ - The Original Text of Nicolas Notovitch's 1887 Discovery • Nicolas Notovitch
... drawn to the recent debate in the Assembly involving the principle of the Higher Law. The subject was a bill reorganizing the National Guard, with the intent of sifting it as clean as possible of the popular element, and thus rendering it either a nullity, or an accomplice in the execution of the Monarchical conspiracies now brewing. It is but a few days since Gen. Changarnier solemnly informed the Assembly, in reply to President Bonaparte's covert menaces at Dijon, that the army could not be made ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... Pitt recommended. He held that the British Parliament was not constitutionally competent to pass a law for taxing the colonies. He therefore considered the Stamp Act as a nullity, as a document of no more validity than Charles's writ of ship-money, or James's proclamation dispensing with the penal laws. This doctrine seems to us, we must own, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... nullity of all expostulation with Mr. Tyrrel, and was therefore content in the present case with confining his attention to the intended victim. The indignation with which he thought of his neighbour's ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... Two millenniums almost, and not a single new God! But still continuing, and as if persisting by right, as an ultimatum and maximum of the God-shaping force, of the creator spiritus in man, this pitiable God of Christian monotono-theism! This hybrid image of ruin, derived from nullity, concept and contradiction in which all decadence instincts, all cowardices and lassitudes of soul have ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 4, June 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... man, with a bilious skin, tall enough to justify his sonorous nullity (for it is rare that a tall man does not have eminent faculties of some kind) outdid the puritanism of the votaries of the extreme Left, all of them so sensitive, after the manner of prudes who have their intrigues to hide. Dressed ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... inexistence^; nonexistence, nonsubsistence; nonentity, nil; negativeness &c adj.; nullity; nihility^, nihilism; tabula rasa [Lat.], blank; abeyance; absence &c 187; no such thing &c 4; nonbeing, nothingness, oblivion. annihilation; extinction &c (destruction) 162; extinguishment, extirpation, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... could work the same miracles with pieces of wood and tobacco-pipe. It takes time for truth to operate as well as Homoeopathic globules. Many persons thought the results of these trials were decisive enough of the nullity of the treatment; those who wish to see the kind of special pleading and evasion by which it is attempted to cover results which, stated by the "Homoeopathic Examiner" itself, look exceedingly like a miserable failure, may consult the opening flourish ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... raises up a revolt against his infallibility. In England, similar differences occasionally exist when an Evangelical wife has allied herself with a husband of a different quality; but in general this source at least of dissension is got rid of, by reducing the minds of women to such a nullity, that they have no opinions but those of Mrs. Grundy, or those which the husband tells them to have. When there is no difference of opinion, differences merely of taste may be sufficient to detract greatly from the happiness of married life. And though it may stimulate the ...
— The Subjection of Women • John Stuart Mill
... but he hardened himself to hear the same innuendo repeated in nearly every note from the Legation. As time went on, Russell was compelled, though slowly, to treat the American Minister as serious. He admitted nothing so unwillingly, for the nullity or fatuity of the Washington Government was his idee fixe; but after the failure of his last effort for joint intervention on November 12, 1862, only one week elapsed before he received a note from Minister Adams repeating his charges about the Alabama, ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... slaveholder? I grant there are; though it must be remembered, that there is one way of even murdering a slave, which some of the slave States do not only not forbid, but impliedly and practically admit[A]. The Professor should know, however, that all these statutes are, practically, a mere nullity. Nevertheless, they show the absoluteness of the power which they nominally qualify. This absoluteness is as distinctly implied by them, as the like was by the law of the Emperor Claudius, which imposed limitations ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... less sacred in that Catholic country, than among those nations where the laws and religion admit of its being dissolved. Because they could not break the contract, they feigned that it had not existed; and the ground of nullity, immodestly alleged by the married pair, was admitted with equal facility by priests and magistrates, alike corrupt. These divorces, veiled under another name, became so frequent, that the most important act of civil society was discovered to be ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... marry her sister's husband. Besides she would have needed the Pope's dispensation for such a union—as Philip had already explained to her—while her birth and crown were the results of a Papal dispensation being declared a nullity. She would thus have fallen into a self-contradiction, to which she must have succumbed in course of time. When told that Philip II had done her some service, she acknowledged it: but when she meditated on it further, she found that ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... nobles, and old fashioned countesses: it is good for nothing for the present generation. The revolution has taught the people to know their rank in the state. They will never consent to fall back into their former nullity, and to be tied up by the nobility and the clergy. The army can never belong to the Bourbons. Our victories and our misfortunes have established an indissoluble tie between the army and myself. It is only through me that the soldiers can earn vengeance, power, ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. I • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... Mr. Johnson dictated. Everywhere Mr. Johnson; nowhere the assumed rights of the States! North Carolina was one of these creations; and North Carolina, through the lips of its Chief Justice, has already decided that Mr. Johnson was an unauthorized intruder, and his work a nullity, and even Mr. Johnson's "people" of North Carolina have rejected the constitution framed by Mr. Johnson's Convention. Other Rebel communities will doubtless repudiate his work, as soon as they can dispense with his assistance. But whatever may be the condition ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... to the springs of human nature. He had not merely analysed the woman till her character lay in ruins around him, but he had built her up again out of the psychic atoms, and Laura was alive. She showed the hand of the master by her own nullity. In her splendid vanity she was like some piece of elaborate golden fretwork, from which the substance had been refined ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... distinction. And herein is divinity conformant unto philosophy, and generation not only founded on contrarieties, but also creation. God, being all things, is contrary unto nothing; out of which were made all things, and so nothing became something, and omneity informed nullity into an essence. ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... had been a struggle at first when the oath of the succession had been tendered to them, and Prior Houghton, with the Procurator, Humphrey Middlemore, had been committed to the Tower. The oath affirmed the nullity of Queen Katharine's marriage with the King on the alleged ground of her consummated marriage with Henry's elder brother, and involved, though the Carthusians did not clearly understand it so at the time, a rejection of the Pope's authority as connected with the dispensation for Katharine's ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... this fact alone, that for three years he had actively shared in affairs and saw the difficulty of them better, by the fact that he was no longer exasperated by the heat of the struggle and by impatience at the political nullity to which events had so long condemned him, had laid aside a part of his former exaggeration. In the lively satisfaction he felt in entering at last, at the age of sixty-seven, upon the enjoyment of ...
— The Duchess of Berry and the Court of Charles X • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... While a century previously the Romans had come forward in this matter with especial and salutary decision, and had in particular introduced their supremacy in the east by a maritime police energetically handled for the general good,(40) the complete nullity of this police at the very beginning of this period as distinctly betokens the fearfully rapid decline of the aristocratic government. Rome no longer possessed a fleet of her own; she was content to make requisitions for ships, when it ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... and expressed by it. Ronsard was never weary. However much one may tire of him, the fatigue never is infected by the nausea which is produced by some of the mechanical sonnet sequences of his contemporaries. No one reading Ronsard ever felt the tedium of mere nullity. It would be hard to find in the whole of M. van Bever's exhaustive edition of 'Les Amours'[9] a single piece which has not its sufficient charge of gusto. When you are tired, it is because you have had enough ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... in domestic legislative power. Congress can not change a law of domestic relation in the State of Maine; no more can it in the State of Missouri. Any statute which proposes to do this is a mere nullity; it takes away no right, it confers none. If it remains on the statute book unrepealed, it remains there only as a monument of error and a beacon of warning to the legislator and the statesman. To repeal it will be only to remove imperfection from the statutes, without affecting, ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Franklin Pierce • Franklin Pierce
... death. As she showed herself to him then, with life all untried before him, so she showed herself still when, in the blackness of his present humour, all life worth the name appeared over and passed. He had changed, so he believed, to the point of nullity and final ineptitude. She remained strong, active, relentless as ever. As long ago, so now, she struck him as monstrous. Yet now, though all the conditions were changed, he had, as long ago, an instinct that from her there ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... she refused to accompany him, no matter upon what ground she based her refusal, she was guilty of desertion. A promise by the husband before marriage as to the establishment of the place of residence of the family, created a moral obligation only and was a mere nullity in law. Whenever there was a difference of opinion between husband and wife in regard to the location of the common home, the will of the wife had to yield to that of the husband. This law of domicile was based upon the grounds ...
— Legal Status Of Women In Iowa • Jennie Lansley Wilson
... say. There is one doubtful indication of his having survived his abdication by about thirty years,[48] but clear historical notices of his subsequent life and of the date of his death are denied us; a striking proof of the absolute nullity ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... present reference, as I think of him, nevertheless—by which I mean in spite of his place in the latter group—greatly helps my documentation; he must have been of so excellent and consistent a shade of nullity. To that value, if value it be, there almost always attaches some question of the degree and the position: with adjuncts, with a relation, the zero may figure as a numeral—and the neglected zero is mostly, for that matter, endowed with a consciousness and subject to irritation. For this dim little ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... observance of the constitution and the laws! After Santa Anna, who was playing the role of a Mexican Warwick, had disposed of this aspirant, he switched blithely over to the Escoceses, reduced the federal system almost to a nullity, and in 1836 marched away to conquer the revolting Texans. But, instead, they conquered him and gained their independence, so that ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd
... of the Roman female, whether married or unmarried, became one of great personal and proprietary independence, for the tendency of the later law, as I have already hinted, was to reduce the power of the guardian to a nullity, while the form of marriage in fashion conferred on the husband no compensating superiority. But Christianity tended somewhat from the very first to narrow this remarkable liberty. Led at first by justifiable disrelish ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... of a clause in the treaty to the effect that Congress would recommend to the legislatures of the several States measures of restitution—a provision which turned out, as Franklin intimated at the time, a perfect nullity. The English Government subsequently {292} indemnified these people in a measure for their self-sacrifice, and among other things gave a large number of them valuable tracts of land in the provinces ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... Council, Las Casas wrote his treatise entitled, The Liberty of the Enslaved Indians (De la libertad de los Indios que han sido reducidos a la esclavitud) which, for greater convenience, he divided into three parts. The first part treated of the nullity of the title on which such slavery was based; the second dealt with the duties of the Spanish sovereign towards the Indians, and the third was devoted to the obligations of the bishops of ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... certainly from his rattling disciple, Zeno's [32] seemingly so fantastic doctrine was sincerely in service. By its destructive criticism, its dissipation of the very conceivability of the central and most incisive of sensible phenomena, it was a real support to Parmenides in his assertion of the nullity of all that is but phenomenal, leaving open and unoccupied space (emptiness, we might say) to that which really is. That which is, so purely, or absolutely, that it is nothing at all to our mixed powers of apprehension:—Parmenides ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... revenues; if it must depend on the voluntary contributions of its members, its existence must be precarious. A government that relies on thirteen independent sovereignties for the means of its existence, is a solecism in theory, and a mere nullity in practice. Is it consistent with reason, that such a government can promote the happiness of any people? It is subversive of every principle of sound policy, to trust the safety of a community with a government ...
— American Eloquence, Volume I. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... to confiscate to the Exchequer a prize, there is but one possible contingency in which the prize can be restored to the opposite belligerent, and that is the one already mentioned of a capture within neutral jurisdiction. And this is done on the ground of the nullity of the original capture. The prize is pronounced not to have been lawfully made, and this being the case, and the vessel being within the jurisdiction of the neutral whose waters have been violated, there is but one course to pursue. The vessel does not belong to the captor, and as she does ...
— The Cruise of the Alabama and the Sumter • Raphael Semmes
... constitution, as well as that concerning slavery, to the people. But, acting in an official character, neither myself nor any human authority had the power to rejudge the proceedings of the convention and declare the constitution which it had framed to be a nullity. To have done this would have been a violation of the Kansas and Nebraska act, which left the people of the Territory "perfectly free to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way, subject only to the Constitution of the United States." It would equally have violated ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 4 (of 4) of Volume 5: James Buchanan • James D. Richardson
... two sorts: first, such as are canonical, and therefore sufficient by the ecclesiastical laws to avoid the marriage in the spiritual court; but these in our law only make the marriage voidable, and not ipso facto void, until sentence of nullity be obtained. Of this nature are pre-contract; consanguinity, or relation by blood; and affinity, or relation by marriage; and some particular corporal infirmities. And these canonical disabilities are either grounded upon the express words of the divine law, or are ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... you. If you will confide in me,—that is, if you will let me represent your interests with the Cardinals and the Holy Father,—I heartily offer you my services as mediator and advocate with regard to the question of nullity. At an early age I studied theology and ecclesiastical law. Your marriage may be considered null and void, according to this or that point of view. You know that upon the death of the Princesse de Nemours, ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... [See "The Nullity of the Pretended Assembly at Saint Andrews and Dundee," &c., p. 312. Printed in the year 1652. As many had been under age when the Solemn League and Covenant was first sworn the Commission of the General Assembly ordained it to be renewed ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... nuptials there is a corresponding class of marriages of true minds. Genuine ones are exceedingly rare during youth; and the impediments, despite the opinion of Shakespeare, are of the nature of nullity, ending most often in unseemly divorce between Hermia and Helena, or the Kings of Sicilia and Bohemia, one of whom, if you remember, tried to poison the other on very small provocation. The last-named is an instructive example ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... misery of the masses, he hastily reviews the growth of the labor movement that ended with the Chartist agitation. Although from 1848 to 1864 was a period when the English working class seemed, he says, "thoroughly reconciled to a state of political nullity,"[25] nevertheless two encouraging developments had taken place. One was the victory won by the working classes in carrying the Ten Hours Bill. It was "not only a great practical success; it was the victory of a principle; ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... spite of its political nullity, Italy was not in a state of decline. Its worst days had ended before the middle of the eighteenth century. The fifty years preceding the French Revolution, if they had brought nothing of the spirit of liberty, had in all other respects been years of progress and revival. In Lombardy ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... produced, or at least disclosed, extreme heats. Mr. Fox and Mr. Pelham have had very high words on every clause, and the former has renewed his attacks on the Chancellor under the name of Dr. Gally. Yesterday on the nullity clause they sat till half an hour after three in the morning, having just then had a division On adjournment, which was rejected by the ministry by above 80 to 70. The Speaker, who had spoken well against the clause, was ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... Europe. Pius VII. had long studied canonical interdictions; he consulted neither his ministers nor his doctors; it was a personal reply he addressed to the emperor. "It is out of our power." said he, "to pronounce the judgment of nullity; if we were to usurp such an authority that we have not, we should render ourselves culpable of an abominable abuse before the tribunal of God; and your Majesty yourself, in your justice, would blame us for pronouncing a sentence contrary to the testimony ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... rot in slavery for another generation. White men do not thus argue concerning their own rights. They know too well the value of ideals. Southern white men see too clearly the latent power of these unexercised rights. If the political power of the Negro was a nullity because of his ignorance and lack of leadership, why were they not content to leave it so, with the pleasing assurance that if it ever became effective, it would be because the Negroes had grown fit for its exercise? On the contrary, they have not rested until ...
— The Negro Problem • Booker T. Washington, et al.
... father who is a retired mustard-maker with some money and no brains, a mother who is a nonentity, and a daughter Clodora,[48] a not bad-looking and not unamiable girl, unfortunately dowered with the silliness of her father and the nullity of her mother combined and intensified. There is some pretty bad stock farce about M. Bringuesingue and his valet, whom he pays to scratch his nose when his master is committing solecisms; and about Edmond's adroitness in ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... submitted the protocol to the Congress, or ever treated or regarded it as in any sense a new negotiation, or as operating any modification or change of the amended treaty. If such had been its effect, it was a nullity until approved by the Mexican Congress; and such approval was never made or intimated to the United States. In the final consummation of the ratification of the treaty by the President of Mexico no reference is made to it. On the contrary, ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Polk - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 4: James Knox Polk • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... exclusive right of practising in the Court of Common Pleas. Upon the advice of Lord Brougham, then Chancellor, King William IV. had issued a written mandate to the court to open their bar to the whole profession. No doubt the act was quite illegal and a nullity. The Serjeants now petitioned the Queen in Council to set it aside. But the court was subsequently opened ...
— 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
... preaching," writes another contemporary,[3183] "rarely culminated in any specific measure or legal provision. He combated everything and proposed nothing; the secret of his policy happily accorded with his intellectual impotence and with the nullity of his legislative conceptions." Once he has rattled his revolutionary pedantry off, he no longer knows what to say.—As to financial matters and military art, he knows nothing and risks nothing, except to underrate or calumniate Carnot and Cambon who did know ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Legislature had directed, but not made by the State, it would be equally invalid. Indeed, the Legislature may itself have given a direction in contravention of the State constitution, and thus the direction prove a nullity. So, too, the Legislature may have acted in contravention of the Federal Constitution, and for that reason its direction may have been void. The appointing power is the State, the manner of its action is prescribed by the Legislature; the valid authority and the valid ...
— The Electoral Votes of 1876 - Who Should Count Them, What Should Be Counted, and the Remedy for a Wrong Count • David Dudley Field
... client, and though he may have given valuable advice on purely legal points, when these arose, it soon became plain that Luis de Leon was the brain of the defence and that he meant to conduct that defence in his own way. Ortiz de Funes became a nullity or, at least, a mere figure-head whose main duty consisted in signing papers which the prisoner had drawn up. A time came when, according to the practice of the Inquisition, it became necessary for Luis de Leon to nominate ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... Kunstwerk der Zukunft. As a matter of fact, it was Herwegh who at last, by a well-timed explanation, brought me to a calmer frame of mind about my own sensitive feelings. It is from this perception of the nullity of the visible world—so he said—that all tragedy is derived, and such a perception must necessarily have dwelt as an intuition in every great poet, and even in every great man. On looking afresh into my Nibelungen poem I recognised with surprise that the very things that now so embarrassed ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... over Skrebensky a sort of nullity, which more and more terrified Ursula. She felt there was something hopeless which she had to submit to. She felt a great sense of disaster impending. Day after day was made inert with a sense of disaster. ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... being more generous than the others, partly because they could trust to the home government to make good their deficiencies. Yet at the same time they did nothing to check, but rather encouraged, the wholesale smuggling by which the trade regulations were reduced to a nullity, though these regulations were not only accepted in principle by themselves, but afforded the only compensation to the mother-country for the cost of colonial defence. It is as unscientific to blame ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir
... or voyages, as well as for the contraventions of their captains and officers against the present treaty, and against the ordinances and edicts which shall be published in consequence of and conformity to it, under pain of forfeiture and nullity ...
— The Medallic History of the United States of America 1776-1876 • J. F. Loubat
... poverty-stricken in spirit! I tell you, you have filled your Heaven with the grossest and most cherished harlots from here below, who have bent their knees piteously before you at their hour of death! I tell you, you have used force against me, and you know not, you omniscient nullity, that I never bend in opposition! I tell you, all my life, every cell in my body, every power of my soul, gasps to mock you—you Gracious Monster on High. I tell you, I would, if I could, breathe it into every human soul, every flower, every leaf, every dewdrop in the garden! I tell you, I would ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... fallen into the hands of one or a few. This in England is placed in the three estates (otherwise called the two Houses of Parliament) in conjunction with the King. And whatever they please to enact or to repeal in the settled forms, whether it be ecclesiastical or civil, immediately becometh law or nullity. Their decrees may be against equity, truth, reason and religion, but they are not against law; because law is the will of the supreme legislature, and that is, themselves. And there is no manner of doubt, but ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... his own in the presence of all the people, and he added some words, by which it was easily understood that the king's authority had to be superior to Guillaume de Caen's commissions. Pont-Grave replied at once: "I see that you believe in the nullity of my commission!" "Yes," replied Champlain, "when it comes in conflict with the king's and the viceroy's authority." This petty dispute had no serious consequence, as it was evident that Pont-Grave, being only the first clerk of Guillaume de Caen, had no other ...
— The Makers of Canada: Champlain • N. E. Dionne
... have been obliged to do. Parnell refused to retire; and Gladstone made it publicly known that if Parnell continued to lead the Irish party, his own leadership of the Liberal party, "based, as it had been, mainly on the prosecution of the Irish cause," would be rendered "almost a nullity." The choice—for it was a choice—was left to the Irish. To retain Parnell as leader in Gladstone's judgment made Gladstone's task impossible, and therefore indicated Gladstone's withdrawal from public life. To part with Parnell meant parting ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... Virginia patent was taken out again under the broad seal of England."[18] To what extent the new charter established the boundaries of Virginia does not appear, and the subsequent turn of affairs in Virginia made the action of Parliament at this time a nullity. ...
— England in America, 1580-1652 • Lyon Gardiner Tyler
... together, men and the snowy ground Into nullity. There is silence, only the silence, never a sound Nor a verity ...
— Bay - A Book of Poems • D. H. Lawrence
... us when the ranks grow thin around us, when age is stealing upon us, when we approach the zenith, and when destiny says to us: "Show what is in thee! Now is the moment, now is the hour, else fall back into nothingness! It is thy turn! Give the world thy measure, say thy word, reveal thy nullity or thy capacity. Come forth from the shade! It is no longer a question of promising, thou must perform. The time of apprenticeship is over. Servant, show us what thou hast done with thy talent. Speak now, or be silent forever." This appeal ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Democratic platform, at their National Conventions, and was brought forward and reaffirmed in their last Convention at Cincinnati. They have contended for that declaration, in the very teeth of the Supreme Court, for more than a quarter of a century. In fact, they have reduced the decision to an absolute nullity. That decision, I repeat, is repudiated in the Cincinnati platform; and still, as if to show that effrontery can go no further, Judge Douglas vaunts in the very speeches in which he denounces me for opposing the Dred Scott decision that he stands on ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... nobility that one of his first efforts was to undo, so far as he could, the mischief effected by the detested Sedition law. Every man who was in durance because of its operation was pardoned, and he looked upon the law as "a nullity as obsolete and palpable, as if congress had ordered us to fall down and worship ...
— Thomas Jefferson • Edward S. Ellis et. al.
... dissensions, and suffered severely from repeated inundations, began to recover. Yet for all this, Philip can be scarcely called a good prince: his merits were negative rather than real. But that sufficed for the nation; which found in the nullity of its sovereign no obstacle to the resumption of that prosperous career which had been checked by the despotism of the House of Burgundy, and the attempts of Maximilian ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... had given a promise of better days, "had been wholly neglected." In short, the Acts passed in our different Islands for the pretended purpose of bettering the condition of the slaves have been all of them most shamefully neglected; and they remain only a dead letter; or they are as much a nullity, as if they had never ...
— Thoughts On The Necessity Of Improving The Condition Of The Slaves • Thomas Clarkson
... formulations of the death idea may occur as tentative solutions of the patient's problems leading to temporary manic episodes while the psychosis is incubating. It seems that stupor as such appears only when death and nullity ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... things—the warrant to be a person, and the injunction to respect other persons as such. Property is the external sphere which the will gives to itself; without property no personality. Through punishment (retaliation) right is restored against un-right (Unrecht), and the latter shown to be a nullity. The criminal is treated according to the same maxim as that of his action—that ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... with him in a new Baptism, that he was out of the way himself, and had mis-led them, for he did not finde that there was any upon earth that could administer Baptism, and therefore their last Baptism was a nullity, as well as their first; and therefore they must lay down all, and wait for the coming of new Apostles: and so they dissolved themselves, and turned Seekers, keeping that one Principle, That every one should have liberty to Worship God according to the ...
— Great Epochs in American History, Vol. II - The Planting Of The First Colonies: 1562—1733 • Various
... us, struggle as we may. The only escape from faith is mental nullity. What we enjoy most in a Huxley or a Clifford is not the professor with his learning, but the human personality ready to go in for what it feels to be right, in spite of all appearances. The concrete man has but one interest,—to be right. That for him is the art of all arts, and ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... wore on, the life-blood seemed to ebb away from Ursula, and within the emptiness a heavy despair gathered. Her passion seemed to bleed to death, and there was nothing. She sat suspended in a state of complete nullity, ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... request to get keeping it. In no shop was he refused, so that by the time he got to the end of the village, he was carrying two dozen large concert placards, while the tout, merrily whistling, and all unconscious of the nullity of his labours, was on his way back to Aberdeen. "Lead us not into temptation," said the minister, as he thrust the garish announcements into his study stove. None of Mr. Pollock's flock were at the concert that night. Perhaps, if any had gone, little harm would have been done. The minister, ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... Civil List by Louis XVIII.—an intolerable position. The Hotel de Grandlieu had been sold by the Republic. It came to Derville's knowledge that there were flaws in the title, and he thought that it ought to return to the Vicomtesse. He instituted proceedings for nullity of contract, and gained the day. Encouraged by this success, he used legal quibbles to such purpose that he compelled some institution or other to disgorge the Forest of Liceney. Then he won certain lawsuits against the Canal d'Orleans, and recovered a tolerably large amount of ...
— Gobseck • Honore de Balzac
... nowhere is such a harmonizing view more pressingly demanded than in universal history; and it can be attained only by recognizing the positive existence, in which that negative element is a subordinate and vanquished nullity. On the one hand, the ultimate design of the world must be perceived, and, on the other, the fact that this design has been actually realized in it, and that evil has not been able permanently to establish a rival ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... precisely how narrow his mind was, how empty his thoughts, and how cold his heart. She had long since found out that the brilliant man of the world, whom everybody considered so clever, was in reality an absolute nullity, incapable of any thought that was not suggested to him by others, and at the same time full of overweening self-esteem, and ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... us in saying that this Self had a beginning, and will therefore have an end. The ego had a beginning, the persona, the temporal mask that unfolds itself in this life, but not the Self that wears the mask. When therefore my Horseherd says, "After death we are just as much a nullity as before our birth," I say, quoderat demonstrandum is still to be proved. What does he mean by we? If we were nothing before birth, that is, if we never had been at all, what would that be that is born? Being born does not mean ...
— The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour • Friedrich Max Mueller
... appointment by the king has meant regularly appointment by the ministry commanding a majority in the lower chamber; and so easy and so effective has proved the process of "swamping" that the legislative independence of the Senate has been reduced almost to a nullity. In general it may be said that the body exercises the function of a revising, but no longer of an initiating or a checking, chamber. During the period 1861-1910 the government presented in the Chamber of Deputies a total of 7,569 legislative proposals, in the Senate but ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... Carteret, had been so frequently at the fort in New York, he should come once to his house, where he might be assured he would be welcome. Hereupon the governor returned again to New York with his object unaccomplished, and shortly afterwards, by proclamation, declared the nullity of the government of Carteret; that at the most he was only the head of a colony, namely, New Jersey; and that he was guilty of misusing the king's name, power, and authority. He sent boats several times to Achter Kol to demand the submission of the place to his authority, ...
— Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679-1680 • Jasper Danckaerts
... for Furst and Company, Berlin Society was farther obliged to pronounce the claim of Miller Arnold a nullity, and that no injustice whatever had been done him. Mere pretences on his part, subterfuges for his idle conduct, for his inability to pay due rent, said Berlin Society. And that impartial Soldier-person, whom ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... success and a kind of magnificence may be attained in stories, professing to be epic, in which there is no dramatic virtue, in which every new scene and new adventure merely goes to accumulate, in immortal verse, the proofs of the hero's nullity and insignificance. This is not the epic poetry of ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... we know, was the affianced husband of Isabella Wardle, and to the scenes of their marriage, the festivities, &c., we owe some pleasing incidents. Trundle was a good specimen of the cypher or nullity; naturally, he is a figure at Manor Farm, but does nothing, and practically says nothing. He was clearly a neighbouring squire of limited ideas, or plain country gentlemen, that could do no more than love his Isabella. Yet, while Boz ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald
... the English squadrons in the North Sea and in the Channel; and the Dutch mercantile marine disappeared from the ocean. England was strong enough to defy the Armed Neutrality, which indeed proved, as its authoress Catherine II is reported to have said, "an armed nullity." There was deep dissatisfaction throughout the country, and mutual recriminations between the various responsible authorities, but there was some justice in making the stadholder the chief scapegoat, for, whatever may have been the faults of others, ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... the Absolute, this makes the Ultimate Whole. And in the Holy Spirit I know the Two Ways, the Two Infinites, the Two Consummations. And knowing the Two, I admit the Whole. But excluding One, I exclude the Whole. And confusing the two, I make nullity nihil. ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... come in the shape of the cholera, which broke out at Sunderland a few days ago. To meet the exigency Government has formed another Board of Health, but without dissolving the first, though the second is intended to swallow up the first and leave it a mere nullity. Lord Lansdowne, who is President of the Council, an office which for once promises not to be a sinecure, has taken the opportunity to go to Bowood, and having come up (sent for express) on account of the cholera the day it was officially ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... comfort. Her husband coming to the crown of France in 1498, under the name of Louis XII., having in view an advantageous match with Anne, the heiress of Brittany, and the late king's widow, alleging also the nullity of his marriage with Jane, chiefly on account of his being forced to it by Louis XI., applied to pope Alexander VI. for commissaries to examine the matter according to law. These having taken cognizance of the affair, declared the marriage void; nor did Jane make any opposition ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... all. He says at once, "That man is an educated man; he has the advantage of me; he shows me that contract; I do not know what is in it; I cannot even read it." Therefore a contract made with a negro in that way is almost a nullity; but if he could read that contract himself and sign his own name to it, it would be a very different thing. I never allow a negro to sign a written contract with me before he has taken it home with him and had some friend to read it over and consult with him about ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... they thought they were progressing Everywhere was feverish excitement, dissipation, and nullity It was a relief when they rose from the table Money troubles are not mortal One amuses one's self at the risk of dying Scarcely was one scheme launched when another idea occurred Talk with me sometimes. You will not chatter trivialities They had only one aim, one passion—to enjoy themselves Without ...
— Widger's Quotations from The Immortals of the French Academy • David Widger |
