"Nonentity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... building a political organization, here in Pennsylvania. In 1960, I think we can elect you President. The world situation will be crucial, by that time, and we had a good-natured nonentity in the White House then, who let things go till war became inevitable. I think President Hartley can be trusted to take a strong line of policy. In the meantime, you can ...
— Time and Time Again • Henry Beam Piper
... went, having swept thousands of souls into eternity, and hundreds of thousands of pounds into nonentity. Lifeboats had not been invented. Harbours of refuge were almost unknown, and although our coasts bristled with dangerous reefs and headlands, lighthouses were few and far between. The consequence was, that ...
— The Lighthouse • R.M. Ballantyne
... his evil insolence to do its worst, and leaving the place at an hour's notice, to sail away to protection, or, if she chose to remain in England, to surround herself with a bodyguard of the people in whose eyes his disrepute relegated a man such as Nigel Anstruthers to powerless nonentity. Alone, she could have smiled and turned her back upon him. But she was here to take care of Rosy. She occupied a position something like that of a woman who remains with a man and endures outrage because she ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... so far as we can discover, these alone, are the proofs on which Mr. Wilson convicts Bernal Diaz of being a nonentity,—of having, like Rosalind in "As you like it," merely "counterfeited to be a man." As a natural sequitur to this delicious train of reasoning, he proceeds to take this nonentity, this "myth," as his guide throughout ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... giving me a hasty shake of the hand; and as mamma was helped in, Mary Waters, who was sitting inside, flung her arms round her, and then round the girls; and the Doctor, who acted footman, jumped on the box, and off they went; taking no more notice of ME than if I'd been a nonentity. ...
— The Fatal Boots • William Makepeace Thackeray
... annoyed, Daunt! He may make it uncomfortable by his mouth, but he cannot control anything by direct political influence. Absolutely not!" The Senator was recovering his confidence in himself as a leader; he started up from his chair and stamped down an emphatic foot. "He is a nonentity in that direction. Politics will handle the thing! The legislature will be all right! The situation on Capitol Hill is safe. However, I think I'll pass a word ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... has always been necessary in the world, my friend," said the Professor calmly; "Either in the shape of a deity or a king. A wood and straw Nonentity is better than an incarnated fleshly Selfishness. Will you give me ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... said simply that he could understand a younger person feeling differently, and that he did not wish to set himself up as a censor. But he could not pretend that he was glad to have been called out of nonentity into being, and that he could imagine nothing better ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... a weak man for its head, it would cease to be in power. Its judgment is its life. Suppose in 1859 that the Whig party had determined to set aside both Earl Russell and Lord Palmerston and to choose for its head an incapable nonentity, the Whig party would probably have been exiled from office at the Schleswig-Holstein difficulty. The nation would have deserted them, and Parliament would have deserted them, too; neither would have endured to see a secret negotiation, on which depended the portentous alternative ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... things he was much more serious and much more sensible than it is the fashion to think he was; he was indeed one of the most serious and sensible critics England ever had of current and present problems, though his criticism is useless to the point of nonentity about all things remote from him in style of civilisation or in time. His point about good manners is really important. All his grumblings through this book of American Notes, all his shrieking satire in Martin Chuzzlewit are expressions of a grave and reasonable ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... mosaic brooch. The paternal Ehrenthal, however, tried in vain to keep up a conversation with him. Fink contrived not to appear aware of his presence, without, however, being in any way rude. Every one felt it to be in the nature of things; and Ehrenthal himself humbly acted the part of nonentity assigned to him, and consoled himself by ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... mother and her three youngest daughters, all draped in deepest black, arrived at Rose Hill prepared to find fault with everything which savored at all of the "horrid country." Even Eugenia sank into nonentity in the presence of the cold city-bred woman, who ignored her existence entirely, notwithstanding that she loudly and repeatedly expressed so ...
— Dora Deane • Mary J. Holmes
... the left cheek, and the loss of his scarlet woollen cap. The Norwegian, however, has to thank Heaven for a narrow escape, since the whole charge of his gun struck the tassel of his cap, and changed that memento of spousal devotion into its original nonentity. ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... as I grew in knowledge of what might have been; but the recluse life of a French girl prevents her from expecting much from marriage but an increase of consequence. With us it is a step from tutelage to liberty—from nonentity to importance. It cannot be quite so much so in England; but, from the greater prevalence of celibacy, it has even more ECLAT and prestige than here, where marriage is the rule. The TROUSSEAU, the presents, the congratulations, the going into society under ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... ridiculed those who sit in high places. He has offended his cousin and patron, the Duke of Marlborough. Without political friends, without the influence and money of the Marlborough family he is a political nonentity." That was eighteen months ago. To-day, at the age of thirty-two, he is one of the leaders of the Government party, Under-Secretary for the Colonies, and with the Liberals the most popular young man in ...
— Real Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... father's house in Britanny. In the year 1677 the 'Bibliotheca Thuana' with all its additions passed to the Abbe Jacques-Auguste de Thou, who was soon afterwards compelled to part with it to the President Charron de Menars. St. Simon praised its new owner as a most worthy and honourable nonentity; but he had the sense to step into the breach and to save the 'Thuana' from destruction. When he sold the library to the Cardinal de Rohan, in 1706, he reserved the Collection Du Puy for his daughters. It is believed that the Cardinal, through the cleverness of ...
— The Great Book-Collectors • Charles Isaac Elton and Mary Augusta Elton
... some highly beneficial measures it was not free from the usual whig failings. Led astray by party spirit, the ministers sent Admiral Pigot, a mere nonentity, to supersede Rodney. Scarcely had they done so when the news of Rodney's victory reached them. A messenger was at once despatched to stop Pigot, but it was too late. Rodney was created a baron, a rank which some thought unequal to his deserts. While the ministers virtuously curtailed the expenditure ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... abuses the elective franchise, and takes it from those who are the only loyal people there, the Constitution says to such a State, You shall lose power in the halls of the nation, and you shall remain where you are, a shriveled and dried-up nonentity instead of being the lords of creation, as you have been, so far as America is concerned, ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... emanate from the glittering wonder are as terrible as they are unnatural. The magic spell exerted by the beaker has transformed the heroic son of Herakles, the more than mortal, into the whimpering coward, the crushed, broken nonentity I found upon the galley's deck. You are silent? Your nimble tongue finds no reply. How could you have forgotten that you aided me to win the wager which forced Antony to gaze into the beaker before I filled it for ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... together; but he cannot yet speak. Something great in him, but it is a dumb greatness. He has had no voice of genius, to be heard of all men and times. He must learn to speak. He is a great dumb monster hitherto. His cannons and Cossacks will all have rusted into nonentity, while that Dante's voice is still audible. The Nation that has a Dante is bound together as no dumb Russia ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... born. Thus awaking from the long night of what seemed, but was not, nonentity, at once into the very regions of fairy land—into a palace of imagination—into the wild dominions of monastic thought and erudition—it is not singular that I gazed around me with a startled and ardent eye—that I loitered away my boyhood in books, and dissipated ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... ends of the weaver's warp; coarse yarn made from THUMB-RING, familiar spirits were supposed capable of being carried about in various ornaments or parts of dress TIBICINE, player on the tibia, or pipe TICK-TACK, game similar to backgammon TIGHTLY, promptly TIM, (?) expressive of a climax of nonentity TIMELESS, untimely, unseasonable TINCTURE, an essential or spiritual principle supposed by alchemists to be transfusible into material things; an imparted characteristic or tendency TINK, tinkle TIPPET, ...
— Every Man Out Of His Humour • Ben Jonson
... race who have ever since worn the martial garb of the Romans. His son, known only by his slighting nick-name of Caracalla, had reigned during six years of insane lust and cruelty, before the knife of an angry soldier avenged the dignity of the Roman name. The nonentity Macrinus had filled the dangerous throne for a single year before he also met a bloody end, and made room for the most grotesque of all monarchs, the unspeakable Heliogabalus with his foul mind and his painted face. He in turn was cut to pieces by the soldiers, and Severus ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... sense of irreparable loss, there was none in that manly heart. There were times when the widower reproached himself for this want of feeling; but in very truth Madame Lenoble, jeune, had lived and died a nonentity. Her departure left no empty place; even her children scarcely missed her. ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... be but a well-dressed nonentity? what will I be but a coward, seeking to get away as far as possible from the place of my defeat, and to hide from its consequences?" he answered, with sharp, ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... a few armed police, but was in no sense independent. Its position in India was analogous to that of British capitalists in America who are operating a mine or factory and have been authorized to police their property. The mighty house of Tamerlane had become a political nonentity, the empire of the Great Mogul was divided among nominal viceroys who were really independent sovereigns, gorgeous but indolent. The teeming millions of India were, for the most part, as unfitted by nature and occupation for the fatigues of war, as were the countless host which Xerxes led into ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... to emperors, queens, prophets and priests, we have one that says he is nobody, a nonentity. One that was never born, and one that was born of her grandmother, and another dropped by the devil flying over the world. One has had the throat cut out and put in wrong, so that what is swallowed ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... chosen to impute the calumny!—on the very eve of the publication of our last number,—affording no scope for explanation for a full month,—during which time I must needs lie writhing and tossing under the cruel imputation of nonentity.—Good heavens! that a plain man must not be ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... Ordax Avecilla, of the Red Cross Society, stated in his speech at the Madrid Mercantile Club, "If he (the General) thought of becoming dictator, he would fall from the heights of his glory to the Hades of nonentity." His enemies persistently insinuated that he was really returning to Spain to support the clericals actively. But perhaps the bitterest satire was levelled against him in El Pais of May 10, which, in an article headed "The Great ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... what he was when living, and instinctively personify the difference as death. Death, strictly analyzed, is only this abstract conceit or metaphysical nonentity. Death, therefore, being but a conception in the mind of a living person, when that person dies death ceases to be at all. And thus the realization of death is the death of death. He annihilates himself, dying with the dart he drives. ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... understand how his eccentric behavior could be harmonized with those principles of teaching which she had imbibed at the state normal school in itself lifted him nearer to equality with her. A public nuisance is really more respectable than a nonentity. ...
— The Brown Mouse • Herbert Quick
... nonentity in impeccable dress, dangling a monocle and trying to make small-talk, the while he dallied with a Bronx cocktail, costing more than a day's wage for a childish flower-making slave of the tenements, and inhaled a Rotten Row cigarette, the "last word" from London in the tobacco line. To the sallies ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... something that might, were our organs fine enough, be seen. Yet who had ever seen it? who could ever see it? Thus, by degrees, it passed into a Doubt, a Relation, some faint Possibility, and, at last, into a highly probably Nonentity. Following Locke's footsteps, the French had discovered that 'as the stomach secretes chyle, so ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... a play called The Silent Woman, who turns out, as might be expected, to be no woman at all—nothing, as Master Slender said, but 'a great lubberly boy,' thereby, as I apprehend, discourteously presuming that a silent woman is a nonentity. If the learned dramatist, thus happily prepared and predisposed, had happened to fall in with such a specimen of female loquacity as I have just parted with, he might, perhaps, have given us a pendant to his picture in the talking lady. Pity but he had! He ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... destroy'st my heaven-born identity! Nine weeks of nights, Before the lights, Swamped in thine own preposterous nonentity, I've been ill-treated, cursed, and thrashed diurnally, Credited for the smile you wear externally— I feel disposed to smash thy face, ...
— The Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... lamented. "As a brother I am a nonentity, Lady Huntingford; it's not altogether relishable, you know. It's a sort of pantomime, for me, by Jove. I'm the fool, and this seems to ...
— Nedra • George Barr McCutcheon
... no one would give up more generously, as a voluntary matter, you could not bear being made a nonentity of, or ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... was sufficiently associated in daily intercourse for all the air of chaperonage that might be needed; and one assistant pupil, whom, to be sure, the young ladies themselves counted as a most convenient nonentity, was left in ...
— A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life. • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... Palmer Pence's authentic Thursday afternoons, with the curtains drawn, the candles glimmering, the right girls lending their aid, the street outside blocked with shimmering carriages, and the great ones of the earth saying to an alien, inexperienced little nonentity, "No lemon, thank you," or, "Another lump of sugar, please,"—a palpitating child who felt that now it but rested with her to readjust her halo and clap her wings and soar onward and upward with the departing host toward the realm ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... it will have no end—no death; though its separate individuality will terminate in time. Its manifestation in time is not a creation; it is an effluence from the eternal fount of spirit. Its disappearance from the stage of time is not an extinction of essence—a reduction to nonentity; it is only a refluence into its original source. As an emanation from the supreme, eternal spirit, it is from everlasting to everlasting. Neither can it be said to be of finite dimensions; on the contrary, says the sacred ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... strangeness in the strange house, provided only that he has chanced upon a fair sprinkling of his own set there. Who the master of the house may be he probably, if an average careless Gallio, knows little and cares less. Indeed, Paterfamilias is usually content to sink his own personality and be a nonentity for the nonce on the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... away, and shortly reappeared with a little man whom he introduced as Dr. Holmes. The doctor was a meagre shrimp of humanity, with a peevish expression on his withered little face, as though he were bored with his own nonentity. He was dressed in faded clothes and carried a small black bag in one hand and a worn hat in the other. If he had any idea of airing a professional protest at being compelled to wait upon the police, the thought vanished as his eye took in the stupendous stature of Superintendent Merrington, ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... said and for a moment his mouth was grim. "I am not accustomed to being regarded as an amiable nonentity, I assure you. It's settled then, is it? The first week in April? And you are to come to us for at ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... an intimate part of his life as if he were being attacked in his physical person. Strip a man one by one of his physical acquisitions, of his associates, of the indications and mementos of the things he has thought and done, and there would be no "self" left. To speak of a man as a nonentity is to imply that he is no "self" worth speaking of; that he can be blown about hither and thither; that neither his opinions nor desires, nor possessions, nor associates make an iota of difference in the world. A man ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... heroic business; and this belongs to thee, to thy own people,—must it be dead forever?—Perhaps yes,—and kill me too into the bargain. Really I think it very shocking that we run to Greece, to Italy, to &c., &c., and leave all at home lying buried as a nonentity. Were I absolute Sovereign and Chief Pontiff here, there should be a study of the Old English ages first of all. I will pit Odin against any Jupiter of them; find Sea-kings that would have given Jason a Roland for his Oliver! We are, as you sometimes ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... satisfied to believe in, as you say, without proofs, save such proofs as I obtain from my own inner consciousness? I tell you, though, in your opinion it is evident my sex is against me, I would rather die than sink into the miserable nonentity of such lives as are lived by the ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... neglect. But when I called there the day after my interview with Mrs. Graham, he happened to be from home—a circumstance by no means so agreeable to me now as it had been on former occasions. Miss Millward was there, it is true, but she, of course, would be little better than a nonentity. However, I resolved to make my visit a short one, and to talk to Eliza in a brotherly, friendly sort of way, such as our long acquaintance might warrant me in assuming, and which, I thought, could neither give offence nor serve to encourage ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... is, in this language, an offence "which produces incarceration." To be starved to death is "to sink from inanition into nonentity." Sir Isaac Newton is "the developer of the skies in their embodied movements;" and Mrs. Thrale, when a party of clever people sat silent, is said to have been "provoked by the dullness of a Witurnity that, in the midst of such renowned interlocutors, produced as narcotic a torpor as could have been ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... very quietly, "I have fancied several times lately that you are a little mistaking me. I am not to have a will of my own; I am to bend in all things to yours; you are to be mistress and master, I a nonentity: is it not so? This is a mistake. No woman ever had a better or more indulgent husband than you shall find in me: but in all necessary things, where it is needful and expedient that I should exercise my own judgment, and act as master, I shall ...
— Elster's Folly • Mrs. Henry Wood
... and independence rather than of weakness. She says to Mr. Dimmesdale that what they did "had a consecration of its own," and it is this belief which supports her under a weight of obloquy that would have crushed a more fragile spirit. She does not collapse into a pitiful nonentity, like Scott's Effie Deans, nor is she maddened to crime like George Eliot's "Hetty Sorrel"; [Footnote: A name apparently compounded from Hester Prynne and Schiller's Agnes Sorrel.] but from the outset she forms definite ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... they seem to have cared little whether these reports contradicted one another. He exhibited his adversary as a man of unbounded violence, as a man of the most pusillanimous nature; General Rukavina was despicable, said these documents, he was an absolute nonentity; but no, shrieked von Thurn on the next day, this man Rukavina was imbued as no other with the abominable spirit of Machiavelli. To bring about the fall of the Hungarian party in Dalmatia, Count Raymond's police set themselves the task of laying by the heels such Hungarian agents as Count ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... Requiem], and you have earned the gratitude of the lay and the profane, as well as of all who are musical, or have any pretensions to be so. To bring a thing of this kind forward as H.W.[1] has done, a man must either be a great personage, or a nonentity. Be it remembered also that it is said this same person has written a book on composition, and yet has ascribed to Mozart such passages ...
— Beethoven's Letters 1790-1826 Vol. 2 • Lady Wallace
... had been busy with the wife of the Richest Trustee—as the widow she did not relax her hold. What the trustees said that day they only repeated from gossip: the little gray wisp of a woman was a nonentity—nothing more—with the spirit of a mouse. She held no position in society, and what she did with her time or her money no one knew. The trustees smiled inwardly and reckoned silently with themselves; at least they would never need to fear opposition ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... interview with Aldous on the subject, he had been more and more inclining to take a cheerful view. He liked to see a young creature of such evident character and cleverness holding opinions and lines of her own. It was infinitely better than mere nonentity. Of course, she was now extravagant and foolish, perhaps vain too. But that would mend with time—mend, above all, with her position as Aldous's wife. Aldous was a strong man—how strong, Lord Maxwell suspected that this impetuous young lady hardly ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... what is man? But flesh and blood. Like shadows flee his days, He marks not how they vanish from his gaze, Suddenly, he must die— He droppeth, stunned, into nonentity. ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... ball-room. Mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, finding their highest enjoyment in the dance, bid farewell to books, to quiet culture, to all the amenities of home. The father will, after a while, go down into lower dissipations. The son will be tossed about in society, a nonentity. The daughter will elope with a French dancing-master. The mother, still trying to stay in the glitter, and by every art attempting to keep the color in her cheek, and the wrinkles off her brow, attempting, without any success, all ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... the historical nonentity of Dr. Faustus was made at Wittenberg, in the year 1683. Some of his popular biographers had claimed for him a professorship at that celebrated university, or at least brought him into connection with it,—a pretension which the actual professors of that learned institution thought rather ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... as to render the virgin birth almost a necessity, as I see it. How otherwise can we explain him? And from a study of the Gospels I simply can not avoid the conclusion that his knowledge of the allness of God rendered matter such a nonentity to him that he overcame all material laws, overcame the world of matter, and even at the last dematerialized his material body. It's an astonishing thought—and yet, who can show that it is not true? There are some things ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... admit that Blackstone was a goose, and that his law, like his logic, is all nonsense when measured by the standard of common sense and practical fact. Admit that a woman, when she becomes a wife does not become a mere nonentity, or I leave you ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... Schaack, for whom Dr. Brown has a letter of credence. Make your journey perfectly at your ease; id est, with dignified leisure. Write me at every post-town, for I shall have a deal of impatience and anxiety about you and your little nonentity. ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... Single or affianced, that woman is strong who leans on God and does her best. Many of you will go single-handed through life, and you will have to choose between two characters. Young woman, I am sure you will turn your back upon the useless, giggling, irresponsible nonentity which society ignominiously acknowledges to be a woman, and ask God to make you an humble, active, earnest Christian. What will become of that womanly disciple of the world? She is more thoughtful of the attitude she ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... to come now, Mr. Amherst," she began haughtily; but a glance from her husband reduced her to a heaving pink nonentity. ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... she think he was—a fool, a loafer, a uniformed nonentity? Didn't she know that for every half hour of pinlighting, he got a minimum of two ...
— The Game of Rat and Dragon • Cordwainer Smith
... is startled, and he disbelieves you; but when a few days afterwards he reads in his newspaper of how some howling nonentity has just been made a peer, or a member of the Government, the incredible sentence he has heard recurs to him. When in the course of the next twelve months five or six other nonentities have enjoyed this sort of promotion (one of whom perhaps he may know from other sources than ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... his happiness, that all his importance should be derived solely from his acquaintance with others. He cared not a straw that he was a man of fortune, of family, of consequence; he must be a man of ton; or he was an atom, a nonentity, a very worm, and no man. No lawyer at Gray's Inn, no galley slave at the oar, ever worked so hard at his task as Sir Lionel Garrett at his. Ton, to a single man, is a thing attainable enough. Sir Lionel was just gaining the envied ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Danish entomologist, has, it seems to us, forever settled the question as to whether the louse bites the flesh or sucks blood, and decides a point interesting to physicians, i.e., that the loathsome disease called phthiriasis is a nonentity. From this source not only many living in poverty and squalor are said to have died, but also men of renown, among whom Denny in his work on the Anoplura, or lice, of Great Britain, mentions the name of "Pheretima, as recorded by Herodotus, Antiochus Epiphanes, the Dictator Sylla, the two Herods, ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... she is irresponsible. The father or the husband is all. They are wisdom, power, responsibility. But woman is a nonentity, if still in her father's house, or if she has a husband. I object to this teaching. It is unjust to man that he should have the added responsibility of his daughter's or wife's word, and it is cruel to woman because the irresponsibility is enslaving in its influence. It ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... further than that just now. He poked the fire and lit another cigarette. Then, glancing idly at the paper, his eye fell upon the list of births, and by merest chance picked out the name of Crayfield. Some nonentity had been 'safely delivered of a son' at Crayfield, the village where he had passed his youth and childhood. He saw the Manor House where he was born, the bars across the night- nursery windows, the cedars on the lawn, the haystacks ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... "She is a nonentity herself, but if Gussie were to be strongly bitten she could do more than any one else, and make her father reform that nest of horrors ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... incompatible, yet they may both be verified. Any one will testify that, in a given environment, say that of high school or university or that of the worst types of what is called society, the maternal instinct may then and there, and for that period, become a nonentity in many a girl. Hence we are entitled to say that it is delicate; much more delicate, for instance, than what we have agreed to call the racial instinct, which is far more imperious and by no means so ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... and a very thin face slightly pockfretten. This man convinced me of the justice of an old remark, that many a faithful portrait in our novels and farces has been rashly censured for an outrageous caricature, or perhaps nonentity. I had retired to my station in the boat—he came and seated himself by my side, and appeared not a little tipsy. He commenced the conversation in the most magnific style, and, as a sort of pioneering to his own vanity, he flattered me with such grossness! The parasites of the old comedy ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... central mass of light. It is unnecessary to enter into the Cabalistic account of creation; it is sufficient here to remark that all was done through the mediate influence of the Aur en soph, or eternal light, which produces coarse matter, but one degree above nonentity, only when it becomes so attenuated as to be ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... of Vance came up close—the watching eyes, the simulated interest, the feigned belief, the detective mental attitude, these broke through the grandiose panorama, bringing darkness. Vance, strong personality that hid behind assumed nonentity for some purpose of his own, intruded with sudden violence, demanding an ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... first time ennui not merely oppresses and wearies me, but it also agonizes and lacerates me, like a cruel pain. I am overwhelmed with a sense of the vanity of all things and the condition of men. My passions are dead, my very despair seems nonentity. As to my studies, which you urge me to continue, for the last eight months I have not known what study means; the nerves of my eyes and of my whole head are so weakened and disordered that I cannot read or listen to reading, nor can I fix my ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... "You poor little strawberry-leafed nonentity," said the Minister, checking himself for a moment in his stride and rolling out his words spasmodically; "who is going to sweep us away, I should like to know? The voting masses are on our side, and all the ability and administrative talent is on our side too. No power of earth ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... Mr. Jarvis, who was tickling one of the cats and whistling a plaintive melody) there was a tendency toward awkward silence. To start bally-ragging a seeming nonentity and then to discover he is the proprietor of the paper to which you wish to contribute is like kicking an apparently empty hat and finding your rich uncle inside it. Mr. Wilberfloss in particular was disturbed. Editorships of the kind which he aspired to ...
— Psmith, Journalist • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... Nothing at all," Isabel replied while her patience helped itself by turning a little to hardness. "If he had done great things would you forgive me any better? Give me up, Mr. Goodwood; I'm marrying a perfect nonentity. Don't try to take an interest in him. ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... now used to the duties, and somewhat experienced therein, I could take all the necessary part of the trouble off your lordship's hands, and so render the provostry in your lordship's name a perfect nonentity." Whereupon, he was pleased to say, if I would do so, and he commended my talents and prudence, he would have no objection to be made the provost at the ensuing election. Something more explicit might have ensued at that time; but Bailie M'Lucre and Mr Sharpset, who was the ...
— The Provost • John Galt
... O'Rane was leaning forward with one elbow on the table and her other hand repressing Gaymer. The cast of the "Divorce" was being slightly changed, and they had thought it worth while to venture a sovereign on the name of one nonentity who was retiring in favour of another. Eric adjudicated in Gaymer's favour and was turning to give Barbara a last chance, when he found that the flood-gates were open and that every one, taking his time from Lady Poynter, was prepared to discuss dramatic art in general and, in ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... Queen Mab, &c. &c. However, you can ask the lawyers, and do as you like: I do not inhibit you trying the question; I merely state one of the consequences to me. With regard to the copyright, it is hard that you should pay for a nonentity: I will therefore refund it, which I can very well do, not having spent it, nor begun upon it; and so we will be quits on that score. It ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... society with the intention of subsiding into a nonentity; and he therefore took the opportunity, a few minutes after sunset, just as his companions were falling into the dance, to beg the favour of being allowed to address his sovereign only for one ...
— The Voyage of Captain Popanilla • Benjamin Disraeli
... should also be included such words as "pseudo-critic," "non-ego," "non-existent." Compare "pseudonym," where the prefix is contracted, and "nonentity." Words like "pre-eminent," divided for the same reason, have ...
— "Stops" - Or How to Punctuate. A Practical Handbook for Writers and Students • Paul Allardyce
... a poet praises the whole creation, we commonly mean only that he praises the whole cosmos. But this sort of poet does really praise creation, in the sense of the act of creation. He praises the passage or transition from nonentity to entity; there falls here also the shadow of that archetypal image of the bridge, which has given to the priest his archaic and mysterious name. The mystic who passes through the moment when there is nothing but God does in some sense behold the beginningless ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... themselves with solemn satisfaction to the "Thornleigh Arms," where a certain portion of their weekly wage would presently transfer itself from their own pockets to that of its jovial landlord. Joe Lovelady was a great, soft, lumbering fellow, who was considered rather a nonentity in Thornleigh; but Ted Wharton was a very different person. He was the village Radical—an adventurous spirit who, not content with spelling out his newspaper conscientiously on Sunday, was wont to produce, even on week-day afternoons, ...
— North, South and Over the Sea • M.E. Francis (Mrs. Francis Blundell)
... recover Saragossa. In 1138 'Ali III. was defeated by Alphonso VII. of Castile and Leon, and in 1139 by Alphonso I. of Portugal, who thereby won his crown, and Lisbon was recovered by the Portuguese in 1147. 'Ali III. was a pious nonentity, who fasted and prayed while his empire fell to pieces under the combined action of his Christian foes in Spain and the agitation of the Muwahhadis or "Almohades'' (q.v.) in Morocco. After 'Ali's death in 1142, his son Tashfin ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... luck that he scarcely deserved. He died without a moment's pain, with a merry thought in his head, perhaps, while many another better man has to linger in torture for weeks. No, Bormann, the best I can say about Winkler is that his death makes one nonentity the less on earth." ...
— The Lamp That Went Out • Augusta Groner
... N. 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, Nirvana, obliteration. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... attached himself to the party of Ricimer, and before long became a conspicuous captain of foederati After the death of Ricimer (18th August, 472), there was a series of rapid revolutions in the Roman State. Olybrius, the then reigning nonentity, died in October ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... dear Ansard, it is however of no consequence. Nothing is more difficult to attain, yet nothing is more easy to describe, than a good dinner. I was once reading a very fashionable novel by a very fashionable bookseller, for the author is a mere nonentity, and was very much surprised at the accuracy with which a good dinner was described. The mystery was explained a short time afterwards, when casually taking up Eustache Eude's book in Sams's library, I found, that the author had copied it out exactly from the injunctions of that ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat
... exactly the case," replied His Excellency. "Permit me to say, Reverend Sir, that I can do nothing else. The Grand Duke is dead, and His Majesty has taken charge of the matter. The Grand Duchess is a ruler herself, at the present time. It is true she is only a foolish girl, who ran away to marry a nonentity—but affairs of state are greater than affairs of the heart. At all risks she must return to Ecknor. I must be certain of her identity before I can make another move. I appreciate the delicacy of the situation. ...
— Charred Wood • Myles Muredach
... improbable iniquity not a single personage has any mark of personal character, or even of any moral quality, save (in Mrs. Wilding's case) that of patience under injury. Hazard 'The Gamester' is chosen as the hero, for what reason it is impossible to say; he is a mere nonentity, doing nothing which may distinguish him from any other gamester and blackguard, save that he is, ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... Jim, should be brought up in a home that he would always cherish and respect. Aunt Jane's husband Frank Lawrence, had no patience with Cheyenne's aimless meanderings. Frank Lawrence was a hard-working, silent nonentity. Aunt Jane was the real manager of the ranch, and incidentally of Little Jim, and her husband was more than content that ...
— Partners of Chance • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... with a very evident attempt to recapture whatever dignity might be left on the field, 'neither Willy nor I like to see an old friend throwing himself away on a little pink and white nonentity like Daisy Stewart. We can't be ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to Brahma. Indeed, though the true Buddhist system looks to the absorption in the Deity,—Nirvana, as it is called,—the popular notion, as received in Burmah and corrupted by less refined minds, made it into what was either absolute nonentity or could not be distinguished from it, so that the ordinary Burman's best hope for the future was of ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... significant, calling for the exercise of tact, courage, and immutable firmness. The particular task was not one which he would have coveted, and yet he welcomed it. Anything,—anything to assuage in him that sense of ineptitude, of being ignored, a titled nonentity! ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... the Unionists will have the sense to carry a measure settling the land question at once. If they do that, I do not believe it will be in the power of man to stir them further. And my belief is that Parnell will be quite content with that solution. He does not want to be made a nonentity by Davitt or ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... abasement in which she held me might have given me (such things often do so) the power to question her with abrupt directness (seeing that, inasmuch as I figured in her eyes as a mere slave and nonentity, she could not very well have taken offence at any rude curiosity); but the fact was that, though she let me question her, she never returned me a single answer, and at times did not so much as notice me. ...
— The Gambler • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... existence, entity. Antonyms: nonexistence, nonentity. Associated Words: ontology, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... of either of the two? As an au fait in the female temperament, I shall wager that it is nine out of ten that if you spoof this mercenary young minx into believing that you are merely a native impecunious nonentity, and not to be shot at with powder, she will instantaneously drop pursuing ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... to me to be colourless in mind as well as in feature. She impressed me neither favourably nor the reverse. She was a nonentity. It was easy to see that she was passionately devoted both to her husband and to her little son. Her light grey eyes wandered continually from one to the other, noting every little want and forestalling it if possible. He was kind to her also in his bluff, boisterous fashion, and on the whole ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... right of deciding by its own courts those questions which concern the execution of its own laws. To this it is answered that the Union is in so singular a position that in relation to some matters it constitutes a people, and that in relation to all the rest it is a nonentity. But the inference to be drawn is, that in the laws relating to these matters the Union possesses all the rights of absolute sovereignty. The difficulty is to know what these matters are; and when ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... freed by God from ruthless overthrow. E'en now a smiling light Was spreading to our sight O'er one last fibre of a blasted tree,— When, lo! the dust of cruel death, Tribute of Gods beneath, And wildering thoughts, and fate-born ecstasy, Quench the brief gleam in dark Nonentity. ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... boiled, threatening to break into revolutionary violence, while the King received one respectable nonentity after another, who each time after a very brief consideration declined the proffered responsibility, Giolitti must have thought that the life of the politician is not an easy one. He was stoned when he ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... repeating. Then he had gone into Parliament, possibly with the idea of making his home life seem less dull; at any rate it redeemed his career from insignificance, for no man whose death can produce the item "another by-election" on the news posters can be wholly a nonentity. Henry, in short, who might have been an embarrassment and a handicap, had chosen rather to be a friend and counsellor, at times even an emergency bank balance; Francesca on her part, with the partiality ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... cloud was on the mind of men, and wailing went the weather, Yea, a sick cloud upon the soul when we were boys together. Science announced nonentity and art admired decay; The world was old and ended: but you and I were gay. Round us in antic order their crippled vices came— Lust that had lost its laughter, fear that had lost its shame. Like the white lock of Whistler, that lit our aimless gloom, Men showed ...
— Poems • G.K. Chesterton
... y, were mirrored in the dancer's play of features. The spectators could not help pondering over the seeming law of injustice that rules the world. Why should x be everything in the equations and y nothing? Why should y's nonentity be used even to set off the all importance of x? But they found no answer. On the other hand, a large number of college freshmen who had failed on their entrance mathematics found no difficulty in passing off their conditions ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... Bonivard with the great reformers, but it leaves you still less for identifying him historically with Byron's great melodramatic Prisoner of Chillon. If the Majority have somewhere that personal consciousness without which they are the Nonentity, one can fancy the liberal scholar, the humorous philosopher, meeting the romantic poet, and protesting against the second earthly captivity that he has delivered him over to. Nothing could be more alien to Bonivard than the character of Byron's prisoner; ...
— A Little Swiss Sojourn • W. D. Howells
... the paper and stared at the paragraph he pointed to. Jim Driscoll—that pitiful nonentity, with his stout mistrustful commonplace wife! It seemed extraordinary that the government should have hunted up such insignificant people. And immediately she had a great vague vision of the splendours they were going to—all the banquets ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... a chair. "I would fly anywhere to escape being entertained by that Ragtime' piece of human nonentity—Louise Taine. I saw them coming, just in time." He was filling his pipe as he spoke. "And how ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... Prussia would fain attempt it, but I will deter Prussia by chastising Austria. To work, gentlemen! In six weeks, at latest, we must give Austria a decisive battle which will make it depend solely on my will whether I permit the house of Hapsburg to reign longer or bury it in the nonentity of ...
— A Conspiracy of the Carbonari • Louise Muhlbach
... but he was too much out of spirits to be sanguine. He said that he should only hear a great deal of offensive stuff from Tomkins the brewer; and that, in the desire to displease nobody, the votes should settle down on some nonentity, was the best which was likely to happen. Thus, grumbling, he set off, and his daughters watched anxiously for his return. They saw him come through the garden with a quick, light step, that made them augur well, and he entered the room with the corners of his mouth ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... me? No, not you," he exclaimed at last, in reply to some version of his own of my ideas, which I carefully made a nonentity under the scrutiny of his keen blue eyes. "No, no, missy; you wait a bit. Uncle Sam was not hatched yesterday, and it takes fifty young ladies ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... healing sickness from the very blossoms of death. And there is chemistry, most poetical save astronomy of all the sciences, seeking to spiritualise the material—to hunt the atom to the point where it trembles over the gulf of nonentity—to weigh gases in scales, and the elements in a balance, and, in its more transcendental and daring shape, trying to interchange one kind of metal with another, and all kinds of forms with all, as in a music-led and mystic dance. Hence we find that such men as Beddoes, the author ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... said the atheist, glancing into Lorand's eyes. "You are explaining to me that the immensity of the world of creation reaching to awful eternity is only equalled by the immensity of the descent to the shapeless nonentity; and that ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... thoughts burn like a hell within him; but the power of thought holds dominion in his mind over every other consideration. The consciousness of a determined purpose, of "that intellectual being, those thoughts that wander through eternity," though accompanied with endless pain, he prefers to nonentity, to "being swallowed up and lost in the wide womb of uncreated night." He expresses the sum and substance of all ambition in one line. "Fallen cherub, to be weak is miserable, doing or suffering!" After ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... eating and drinking which in spite of the glamor we throw about it is simply repairing the mechanical waste and renewing the chemical energy that will enable us to go on a little while and a little way farther); take out the time spent in sleep—in practical nonentity—and the remainder is a pitiful handful of years, so few, that to number them seems like a mathematical mockery, ...
— Christ, Christianity and the Bible • I. M. Haldeman
... There is a wide diversity in human beings ranging from herculean physical strength to pitiable weakness; from the mental power of genius to the nonentity of imbecility; from outstanding and unquestionable talent in arts and letters to illiteracy and clumsy inefficiency. This wide diversity in human capacity is one of the outstanding features of human nature, ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... dogmatist in all ages have entertained no doubt of their own loyalty to truth; but it was loyalty to their own very limited perceptions, and to their profound conviction that all outside of their own sphere of perception was falsehood or nonentity, and should be received with supercilious scorn or ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, January 1888 - Volume 1, Number 12 • Various
... at the works to-day," he said; and then, with a gesture of the hands and a shrug, he described Lord Ferriby as a nonentity. "He went through the works, and looked over your books. I wrote out a sort of certificate of his satisfaction with both, and—he ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman
... contracting principles of human life!" "The Kwei Shans" are brought about by the dissolution of the human frame—and consist of the expanding and ascending Shan which rambles about in space, and of the contracted and shrivelled Kwei, which reverts to earth and nonentity. Therefore, the Kwei is the physical body; the Shan is the vital principle the Kwei Shan the linga-sariram, or the vital soul; Zhing the fourth principle or Kama Rupa, the essence of will; pho, the animal soul; Khi, the spiritual soul; and Hwun the pure ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... lighted up with an atrocious satisfaction. "He's nothing but a thief," she cried, "this father of yours. As to you I have never been deceived in you for a moment. I have been growing more and more sick of you for years. You are a vulgar, silly nonentity, and you shall go back to where you belong, whatever low place you have sprung from, and beg your bread—that is if anybody's charity will have anything to do with ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... dear Artie couldn't take a fancy to some nice, appreciative, kind-hearted, practical girl like that now, instead of wearing away all the best days of his life in useless regret for that poor slender, unsubstantial nonentity of a watery little ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... forced to smile at the strange metamorphosis of her face when she put them on and turned it toward me. With the small, sharp eyes, her most characteristic feature, concealed, the face became almost a nonentity. ...
— Against Odds - A Detective Story • Lawrence L. Lynch
... their sanhedrim, and set the tone to the gossip of their respective spheres. This idle but ever busy fraternity, invisible, yet seeing all things, dumb, but perpetually talking, possessed an influence which its nonentity seemed to render harmless, though it was in fact terrible in its effects when it concerned itself with serious interests. For a long time nothing had entered the sphere of these existences so serious and so momentous to each one of them as the struggle of Birotteau, supported ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... as cock of the walk at the Hotel de Rupt, and all Besancon regarded him as Rosalie de Watteville's future husband. There had even been some exchange of ideas on the subject between the Baroness and Amedee, to which the Baron's apparent nonentity gave some certainty. ...
— Albert Savarus • Honore de Balzac
... myself of the heavy burden which I have borne alone ever since our separation. Now I feel lighter. You are not a severe judge. Doubtless you deplore my weakness, but you do not condemn me. If, as I have already said, I have done no good, neither have I committed any wicked action. I have been a nonentity—an utterly useless being; 'one too many,' like the sad hero of Tourgueneff's sad story. Before leaving, I wrote to Francis informing him that the death of a relative obliged me to return to Europe, and giving him your address, so as not to seem to be running away ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German • Various
... comfortable about it they should start fairly equal. Take your case, for instance. You brought your husband a large fortune, your people were well known in society, your family interest I have heard was useful to him in his parliamentary career. So far as I am concerned, I am just now a hopeless nonentity. Your brother has everything—I have not shown myself capable even of earning my own living except in a way which could not possibly bring any credit upon anybody. And beyond this, Lady Lescelles, as you must know, recent events have set a good many people's tongues wagging, and I am ...
— Anna the Adventuress • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... he staked his only wealth, his popularity, in the gamble of an election. This time he was successful. During the following winter he sat in the Legislature of Illinois; a huge, uncouth, mainly silent member, making apparently no impression whatever, very probably striking the educated members as a nonentity ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... the feeling that, for all her repression, Maggie would have been glad to be more free with him. And he knew enough of human nature not to be too disheartened by her attitude. Had he been a nonentity to her, she would have ignored him. Her very insults were proof that he was a positive personality with real significance in her life. And so he counseled himself to have patience and await a thawing or an awaking. Besides, he kept ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... used to denote the nonentity or absence of a thing, as well as its reality; as, nothing, naught, ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham
... chez nous... En un mot, set the most insignificant nonentity to sell miserable tickets at a railway station, and the nonentity will at once feel privileged to look down on you like a Jupiter, pour montrer son pouvoir when you go to take a ticket. 'Now then,' he says, 'I shall show you my ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... character, and if he is coming out as a genius he will be quite the style. There is one woman who could do the honors perfectly,—madame,—and she feels as if she could almost wring the life out of the small nonentity who has usurped her place, for of course Floyd would soon have cared for madame if she had ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... interfering with the excellent performance of his special job. A man who breaks a road to individual distinction by such questionable means may always be tainted; but he is a better public servant than would be some comparatively impeccable nonentity. It all depends on the nature and the requirements of the particular task, and the extent to which a man has really made sacrifices in order to accomplish it. There are many special jobs which absolutely demand scrupulous veracity, ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... the Canadas, its commerce consisted of a few peltries, conveyed to France by the vessels which brought out the troops and carried back the disbanded regiments. The lumber trade was unknown. The importations were a nonentity. While at present many hundreds of vessels are engaged in the direct timber trade, and more than one hundred and fifty vessels have been frequently counted on the river St Lawrence. These, it must be remembered, are almost exclusively owned ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat) |
