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More "Vacuous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... up for a moment, but instantly avoided the other's glance, his features being still distorted by a vacuous smile. ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... in the blackness of night, amidst the fury of the storm, that Montesma's opinion had been formed. Smithson began to think that his friend was right. The sailors had honest countenances, but they looked horribly stupid. Could men with such vacuous grins, such an air of imbecile good-nature, be capable of acting wisely in any terrible crisis?—could they have nerve and readiness, quickness, decision, all those grand qualites which are needed by the seaman who has to contend with the fury ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... Illness had dimmed his eyes, formerly brightened by the pleasures of good living and devoid of serious ideas, with a veil which simulated thought. It was but the skeleton of the old Birotteau who had rolled only one year earlier so vacuous but so content along the Cloister. The bishop cast one look of pity and contempt upon his victim; then he consented to forget him, ...
— The Vicar of Tours • Honore de Balzac
... temporarily by an insistence upon technical perfection as in itself a supreme good. Neither the art of religion nor the religion of art is an adequate statement of the possibilities and purpose of art, but there is no doubt that the religion of art is by far the more vacuous of the two. The values of literature, the standards by which it must be criticised, and the scheme according to which it must be arranged, are in the last resort moral. The sense that they should be more ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... he said in his vacuous English voice. "Marshall wrote a 3 by inadvertence and changed it. He borrowed my ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... touch had discharged all power from the man he had seized, the fierce look faded from his face, which grew heavy, vacuous, and dull; his legs trembled beneath him, and he lurched forward, and was only saved from falling by a rapid movement on Stratton's part as he swung him into an easy-chair, where his enemy sank back with his head lying over on one shoulder, ...
— Witness to the Deed • George Manville Fenn
... His countenance, expressive for a moment, was now reserved. His eyes became vacuous. He did not appear to hear the skipper's wondering question. He was now attending to his own monologue. His lips let fall, as if mechanically, in a low murmuring tone, ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... a good-looking, if rather vacuous, young man with a long, elegant body. His dark, sleek hair was always carefully brushed and his small mustache trimmed and curled. His beautiful clothes suggested the fashionable tailors of Savile Row. Everything about him—his ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett
... was a creature contented enough. And why not—with a sufficient income, a comfortable home, and fair health? At the end of a day devoted partly to sheer vacuous idleness and partly to the monotonous simple machinery of physical existence—everlasting cookery, everlasting cleanliness, everlasting stitchery—her mother did not with a yearning sigh demand, "Must this sort of thing continue for ever, or will a new ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... quickly to his feet and in the instant his whole demeanor changed. From demoniacal rage he became suddenly convulsed with hysterical laughter although it was a question in the girl's mind as to which was the more terrifying. His companions stood looking on with vacuous grins upon their countenances, while he from whom the girl had wrested the weapon leaped up and down shrieking with laughter. If Bertha Kircher had needed further evidence to assure her that they were in the hands of a mentally deranged ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... What would such a man do loosed in the world? What might he not do? Was it possible that it was this man who stood before us now with his eyes fastened upon us so intently and his lips spread in that little, empty smile? Suddenly I knew! Those eyes! Those eyes were the shiny, vacuous, ...
— The Floating Island of Madness • Jason Kirby
... Cloud-like we lean and stare as bright leaves stare, And gradually along the stranger hill Our unwalled loves thin out on vacuous air, ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... emotions, to crush altogether the sexual nature would be a barren, if not, indeed, a perilous victory, bringing with it no satisfaction. "If I had only had three weeks' happiness," said a woman, "I would not quarrel with Fate, but to have one's whole life so absolutely empty is horrible." If such vacuous self-restraint may, by courtesy, be termed a virtue, it is but a negative virtue. The persons who achieve it, as the result of congenitally feeble sexual aptitudes, merely (as Gyurkovechky, Fuerbringer, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... Alec scowled at the President; but Sergius Nesimir's vacuous features so obviously revealed his condition of speechless surprise and distress that there remained only ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... intellectual condition of the passengers, I should say that faces were prevailingly vacuous, their owners half hypnotized, as it seemed, by the monotonous throb and tremor of the great sea-monster on whose back we were riding. I myself had few thoughts, fancies, emotions. One thing above all struck me as never before,—the terrible ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... Boys, in the background, more or less quiet. Dull faces here, there,—in how many places! I don't say dull PEOPLE, but faces without a ray of sympathy or a movement of expression. They are what kill the lecturer. These negative faces with their vacuous eyes and stony lineaments pump and suck the warm soul out of him;—that is the chief reason why lecturers grow so pale before the season is over. They render LATENT any amount of vital caloric; they act on our minds as those cold-blooded creatures I was ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... being both as true and as consistent with one another as taking pains with his mind could make them, distinguished Mr. Mill from the men who flit aimlessly from doctrine to doctrine, as the flies of a summer day dart from point to point in the vacuous air. It distinguished him also from those sensitive spirits who fling themselves down from the heights of rationalism suddenly into the pit of an infallible church; and from those who, like La Mennais, move violently between faith and reason, between tradition and inquiry, between the ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 3 (of 3) - Essay 2: The Death of Mr Mill - Essay 3: Mr Mill's Autobiography • John Morley
... poetry lies not in knowledge of it but in assimilation of it. Most talk about poetry is vacuous. Poetry can pass no power into any human being unless it itself has power—power of beauty, truth, wit, humor, pathos, satire, worship, and other attributes, always through form. No poor poetry is worth reading. Taste for the best makes the ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... The girl had eyes, to be sure—two of them—and they were brown, with a touch of beryl in the brown, and, conceivably, they had a soul behind them, of one sort or another, but she had as much personality as a jelly-fish. She was neither pleased nor affronted by the vacuous ass's compliments, and when he praised her hair and her complexion, she accepted it as placidly as if she had been a waxen lady in a ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... amortist." Of his views on polygamy, to which he had distinct leanings, we shall speak later. He said he required two, and only two qualities in a woman, namely beauty and affection. It was the Eastern idea. The Hindu Angelina might be vacuous, vain, papilionaceous, silly, or even a mere doll, but if her hair hung down "like the tail of a Tartary cow," [96] if her eyes were "like the stones of unripe mangoes," and her nose resembled the beak of a parrot, the Hindu Edwin was more than satisfied. Dr. Johnson's "unidead girl" would ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... eccentric methods of finding it out. He accordingly set off at his best pace, and pushed Ladoc so hard, that he arrived at the upper fishery in a state of profuse perspiration, with a very red face, and with a disagreeably vacuous feeling about ...
— Fort Desolation - Red Indians and Fur Traders of Rupert's Land • R.M. Ballantyne
... only casually, at an Eastern Star dance, at the shop, where, in the presence of Nat Hicks, they conferred with immense particularity on the significance of having one or two buttons on the cuff of Kennicott's New Suit. For the benefit of beholders they were respectably vacuous. ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... he spoke, in absent wise, "that all young women having that peculiarly vacuous expression about the eyes—I believe there are misguided persons who describe such eyes as being 'dreamy,'—are invariably possessed of a fickle, unstable and coquettish temperament. Oh, no! You may depend upon it, ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... shows that the very evolutionary principles to which the German scientist appeals demolish his theory! He practically says to Haeckel, "Your philosophy, sir, fails to show how it is possible for the vacuous mind of the infant to evolve into the genius of the philosopher in thirty or forty years." In other words, if the infant is nothing but the form we see it would be utter absurdity to say that that mass of matter can evolve a high grade ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... had fallen on their wits. They were stunned under the shock of the blow he had dealt them. Anon there would be railings and to spare—against him, against themselves, against the dead man above stairs, against Fate, and more besides. For the present there was this horrid, almost vacuous calm. ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... startled by an audible titter from Patty, who hastily composed her face and assumed a look of vacuous innocence—but too late. She had caught the instructor's ...
— When Patty Went to College • Jean Webster
... was ushered in; irreproachable, flawless, exquisite. ("It's him!" breathed Loring.) He remained standing, hat in hand, fitted his glass with vacuous care and surveyed the room with deliberately insolent scrutiny. Thompson kept his seat, fairly prickling with antagonism. The others rose with exemplary ...
— The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... Bazhakuloff! Those Russians, it struck him, had been providentially sent to Nepenthe for his delectation and instruction. He was glad to have beheld a type of this nature, inconceivable in England. That grotesque, with three million followers! It had been a liberal education to look into his vacuous face, into those filmy eyes dripping with saintliness and alcohol. The Little White Cows! Chimaeras, engendered ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... ordinary pressure, or even in an absolute vacuum. Experiment alone could answer this question, but there were difficulties in the way of this which seemed almost insurmountable. The rays are stopped by glass even of slight thickness, and how then could the almost vacuous space in which they have to come into existence be separated from the space, absolutely vacuous or filled with gas, into which it was ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... collects around it in time many others, whose mental processes are a feeble imitation of its own. Thus it came to pass that, as the years rolled on, Harston learned to lean more and more upon his old school-fellow, grafting many of his stern peculiarities upon his own simple vacuous nature, until he became a strange parody of the original. To him Girdlestone was the ideal man, Girdlestone's ways the correct ways, and Girdlestone's opinions the weightiest of all opinions. Forty years of this undeviating ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Boca flung herself in front of him. "Pig!" she flamed. She turned furiously on her father, whose vacuous grin faded as she cursed ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... with angry lampoons or rude violence. The poem is an idyll quite as much as a satire. The follies of fashionable life are treated with nothing severer than light raillery; and its actually distasteful features,—its lapses into stupidity, its vacuous restlessness, its ennui,—are cunningly suppressed. But all that made it seem the height of human felicity is preserved, and enhanced in charm. "Launched on the bosom of the silver Thames," one glides to Hampton Court amid youth and ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... in listless progress. The light, reflected from the screen, revealed a throng of repulsive faces, stretching, row upon row, into the darkness of the rear, into the shadows of the roof—sickly and pimpled and bloated flesh: vicious faces, hopeless, vacuous, diseased. And these were the faces that leered and writhed in the boy's dreams of hell. Here, present and tangible, were gathered all his terrors. He was in the very midst ...
— The Mother • Norman Duncan
... of his father's death, William B. Astor, the chief heir of John Jacob Astor's twenty million dollars, was fifty-six years old. A tall, ponderous man, his eyes were small, contracted, with a rather vacuous look, and his face was sluggish and unimpressionable. Extremely unsocial and taciturn, he never betrayed emotion and generally was destitute of feeling. He took delight in affecting a carelessly-dressed, slouchy ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... appeared as if caricaturing the gnarled and tortured boughs and trunks of the apple-trees. The peasant's blouse was filthy; his sabots were reeking with dirty straw; his feet and ankles, bare, were blacker than the earth over which he was painfully crawling; and on his face there was the vacuous, sensuous deformity of the smile idiocy wears. Again I ask, why did he not disfigure this fair scene, and put out something of the beauty of the day? Is it because the French peasant seems now to be an inseparable adjunct of the Frenchman's landscape? That ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... M. P. An orderly held us up, and when MacRae had convinced him that our business was urgent, and not for his ears, he graciously allowed us to enter the Presence—who proved to be a heavy-set person with sandy, mutton-chop whiskers set bias on a vacuous, round, florid countenance. His braid-trimmed uniform was cut to fit him like the skin of an exceedingly well-stuffed sausage, and from his comfortable seat behind a flat-topped desk he gazed upon us with the wisdom ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... had, as they all had, for the last few days, in an atmosphere perpetually tremulous with echoes and implications, it was restful and fortifying merely to walk into the big blank area of Miss Painter's mind, so vacuous for all its accumulated items, so echoless for ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... There was one man whom, in other circumstances, Lavender would have dismissed with contempt as an excellent specimen of the unmitigated cad. He wore a white waistcoat, purple gloves and a green sailor's knot with a diamond in it, and there was a cheery, vacuous, smiling expression on his round face as he industriously smoked a cheroot and made small jokes to the friends who had come to see him off. One of them was a young woman, not very good looking perhaps, who did not join in the general hilarity; and it occurred to Lavender that the jovial ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... convalescence, half-reclined in a great chair on the veranda and watched the dusky blue mist twining itself around the brown hills. She was not thinking of the babies; she was not worrying about home; she was not longing for anything, or even indulging in a dream. That vacuous content which engrosses the body after long indisposition, held her imperatively. Suddenly she was aroused from this happy condition of nothingness by the spectacle of an enormous bull-dog approaching her with threatening teeth. She had noticed the monster often in ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... of the energy of its founder. He is by far the most contemptible of the figures in this passage. Note his notion of, and his feeling to, Jesus. He thought of our Lord as of a magician or juggler, who might do some wonders to amuse the vacuous ennui of his sated nature. Time was when he had felt some twinge of conscience in listening to the Baptist, and had almost been lifted to nobleness by that strong arm. Time was, too, when he had trembled at hearing of Jesus, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... "I 'm not a calling man. And I 've come down here for rest and recreation. I 'll pay no calls. Let that be understood. Calls, quotha! And in the country, at that. Oh, don't I know them? Oh, consecrated British dulness! The smug faces, the vacuous grins; the lifeless, limping attempts at conversation; the stares of suspicious incomprehension if you chance to say a thing that has a point; and then, the thick, sensible, slightly muddy boots. ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... virtues of a high order were not likely to develop. If he betook himself to the town his possible usefulness lessened in proportion as he fell into drunken or dissolute habits, or lapsed into a state of lazy and vacuous dreaminess, enlivened only by chatter or the rolling of a cigarette. On the other hand, when employed in a capacity where native talent might be tested, he often revealed a power of action which, if properly guided, could be turned to excellent account. ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd
... are about to be married; everything prepared—four apathetic bridesmaids, and the four acolytes in tights—who have possibly been kindly lent by the Convent for the occasion—in a vacuous row at the back of the scene. Fancy Manrico has forgotten to give them the usual initial brooches, and they feel the wedding is a poky affair, and take no interest in it. Leonora herself is in low spirits—seems ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 29, 1892 • Various
... go some," Lambert commented in the vacuous way of a man who felt that he must say something, even though he didn't ...
— The Duke Of Chimney Butte • G. W. Ogden
... round him for his hat. On a table behind him a monthly magazine lay open, exhibiting one of those melancholy modern "illustrations" which present the English art of our day in its laziest and lowest state of degradation. A vacuous young giant, in flowing trousers, stood in a garden, and stared at a plump young giantess with enormous eyes and rotund hips, vacantly boring holes in the grass with the point of her parasol. Perfectly incapable of explaining itself, this imbecile production put its ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... us who are neither hungry nor vacuous, there is not, generally speaking, much attempt to make the best of our spiritual privileges. We teach our children, as we were taught ourselves, to give importance only to the fact of exclusiveness, expense, rareness, already ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... a big bottle with a cap and scarf of gold foil stood sentinel over two glasses of such an exquisite shape that Marcella stared hard at them as she passed, saying "Good night." Mr. Peters was smiling with filmy, vacuous eyes. The little lady was flushed and vivid-looking. They both nodded beamingly at her. At the other side of the steps, in the bright light of the electric lamp was a small bundle, between two scarlet fire buckets. It ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... Bartlett. I can well believe it. The empty shibboleths—the loud and blatant voice—the bumptious temper—that make the commoner form of Tory—all are there. He is the dramatically complete embodiment of all the vacuous folly, empty-headed shoutings, and swaggering patriotism which make up the stock-in-trade of most provincial Tories. Poor Mr. Balfour was caught by Sir Ashmead before he had time to escape, and in sheer decency had to remain while his servile adulator was pouring on ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... consider a passionate love of music to be fashionable. It is so easy, you see, to possess it. There is no need to study either musical theory, practice, history, or biography. An inane expression of vacuous content when music is being rendered, a quantity of rhapsodical rubbish about Chopin and Beethoven without any knowledge of either, and behold! a lover ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... odious woman mean by perpetually talking about Sir Abraham? The Countess intercepted a glance between her and the hated Juliana. She felt it was a malignant conspiracy: still the vacuous vulgar air of the woman told her that most probably she was but an instrument, not a confederate, and was only trying to push herself into acquaintance with the great: a proceeding scorned and abominated by the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... forward to this great release of creative and constructive energy, not as an idle, vacuous mirage, but as a promise which we, as the whole human race, have it in our power, in the very conduct of our lives from day to day, to transmute into a glorious reality. Let us look forward to that era, perhaps not so distant as we believe, ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... said in his vacuous English voice. "Marshall wrote a 3 by inadvertence and changed it. He borrowed my penknife to ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... scowled at the President; but Sergius Nesimir's vacuous features so obviously revealed his condition of speechless surprise and distress that there remained only ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... "smart," so-called "Society" people who emphasised the protest in him to the point of definite contempt. Overdressed, the latest worldly novel under their arms, they strutted the narrow pavements of their tiny world, immensely pleased with themselves. Their vacuous minds expressed themselves in the slang of their exclusive circle—value being the element excluded. The pettiness of their outlook hardly distressed him—he was too familiar with it at home—but their essential vulgarity, ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... than he seemed. Arms hanging and face vacuous, he side-stepped smartly to the left, escaping a swinging right aimed at his head, and, as the great body passed, drove a short, heavy left punch under the still raised right arm, which shook Ockley severely and, increasing the impetus ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... outings involved in my slow convalescence from the extremity of fever, I approached that straitened and somewhat bedarkened issue of the Rue de l'Ecu (was it?) toward the bright-coloured, strongly-peopled Port just where Merridew's English Library, solace of my vacuous hours and temple, in its degree too, of deep initiations, mounted guard at the right. Here, frankly, discrimination drops—every particular in the impression once so quick and fresh sits interlinked with every other in ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... would such a man do loosed in the world? What might he not do? Was it possible that it was this man who stood before us now with his eyes fastened upon us so intently and his lips spread in that little, empty smile? Suddenly I knew! Those eyes! Those eyes were the shiny, vacuous, soulless eyes ...
— The Floating Island of Madness • Jason Kirby
... same time advanced to her. He was a man of the middle size, with a short snub nose, a pair of vacuous protruding brown eyes, and a moustache of some ferocity. He lifted his hat from his head and disclosed a round ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... sixty of Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown's more intimate friends had gathered. The whole meeting was composed of ladies, except for the presence of one or two men who represented special cases. There was, of course, little Mr. Spillikins, with his vacuous face and football hair, who was there, as everybody knew, on account of Dulphemia; and there was old Judge Longerstill, who sat leaning on a gold-headed stick with his head sideways, trying to hear some fraction of what was ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock
... to the inattentive, vacuous mother. "Your daughter," he began, "is fast growing up. Soon ...
— Civilization - Tales of the Orient • Ellen Newbold La Motte
... She was in the seat beside him. Every dear, every sweet, every luscious, lovely memory of her was there ... and behind him, just out of eye-corner visibility, were the three kids. And a whole lifetime of this loomed ahead—a vista of emptiness more vacuous far than the emptiest reaches of intergalactic space. Damnation! He ...
— The Vortex Blaster • Edward Elmer Smith
... in the mid-day heat, like some vacuous beauty lounging in a guarded harem. The town lay at the sea's edge on a strip of alluvial coast. It was set like a little pearl in an emerald band. Behind it, and seeming almost to topple, imminent, above it, rose the sea-following range of the Cordilleras. In front the sea was ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... for years that he had come at last to resemble an animal less than he resembled a machine; and Nature (who has a certain large and careless manner of dispensing justice) had punished him in the end by depriving him of the ordinary animal capacity for pleasure. The present state of vacuous contentment was, perhaps, as near the condition of enjoyment ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... grove. He is a fair, fresh-colored Englishman of twenty-five, handsome in a rather vacuous way. He wears white duck riding-breeches, light-tan leather riding-gaiters and shoes, a riding-coat of white duck, a waistcoat light tan in shade, and a high riding-stock, the collar of which is white, the "puffed" tie pink; a Panama hat with a fold of light ...
— The Man from Home • Booth Tarkington and Harry Leon Wilson
... say, when you ask them if they are using a condensing engine, "I can not use it; I have not water enough." A very sufficient answer indeed, if an injection condenser or an ordinary surface condenser constituted the sole means by which a vacuous condition might be obtained; but a very insufficient answer, having regard to the existence of the evaporative condenser, as by its means, whenever there is water enough for the feed of a non condensing engine, there is enough to condense, and to ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 312, December 24, 1881 • Various
... her with helplessly open mouth, and eyes so vacuous that Amelia felt, even at that moment, the ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... was startled by an audible titter from Patty, who hastily composed her face and assumed a look of vacuous innocence—but too late. She had caught ...
— When Patty Went to College • Jean Webster
... got anything against you." She addressed it as if there were an intelligence back of the vacuous pleasantness of the young face. "It's only that there's not any you and hasn't been for I don't know how long. It's so much deader than death, all ashes to ashes and dust to dust and the spirit turned into something different." And then ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... Of his views on polygamy, to which he had distinct leanings, we shall speak later. He said he required two, and only two qualities in a woman, namely beauty and affection. It was the Eastern idea. The Hindu Angelina might be vacuous, vain, papilionaceous, silly, or even a mere doll, but if her hair hung down "like the tail of a Tartary cow," [96] if her eyes were "like the stones of unripe mangoes," and her nose resembled the beak of a parrot, the Hindu Edwin was more than satisfied. Dr. Johnson's ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... perfection as in itself a supreme good. Neither the art of religion nor the religion of art is an adequate statement of the possibilities and purpose of art, but there is no doubt that the religion of art is by far the more vacuous of the two. The values of literature, the standards by which it must be criticised, and the scheme according to which it must be arranged, are in the last resort moral. The sense that they should be more moral than morality affords no excuse for accepting them when they are ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... he muttered-"'Spiritual'?" A faint dull vacuous smile flickered over his face, and he shuddered. "I understand! You come to prepare my soul ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... of walking very fast—almost of taking flight—down a long dim corridor, and of a door that opened into an immense room. All that I remember of it, as I saw it then, was a number of pastel portraits of weak, vacuous individuals, in dulled, gilt, oval frames. The heads stood out from the panelling and stared at me from between ringlets, from under powdered hair, simpering, or contemptuous with the expression that must have prevailed in the monde of the time before the Revolution. ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
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