"Hollowness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... eighteenth century that Christianity was discredited in the minds of all free and reasonable men. Its tenets were incompatible with that which enlightened men infallibly knew to be true. It could be no long time until the hollowness and sham would be patent to all. Even the interested and the ignorant would be compelled to give it up. Of course, the invincibly devout in every nation felt of instinct that this was not true. They felt that there is an inexpugnable truth of religion. Still that ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... to return to our thin diet, and, instead of jolly after-dinner talk, repeat the high and aspiring phrases of certain New-Englanders who lead the generous thought and life of a continent. Phrases! Yes, but how many nebulous ideas, think you, would it take to stuff out their hollowness? Nay, my objecting friend, if the ideas are not wholly clear, nor immediately practicable, they are seldom shallow, and never mean. If the wisdom of our true seers sometimes seems poured out in thin dilution, it nevertheless soon hardens to a thousand shining crystals upon men of worldly ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... of The Pillars of Society was the hollowness and rottenness of those supports, and the severe and unornamented prose which Ibsen now adopted was very favorable to its discussion. He was accused, however, of having lived so long away from home as to have fallen out of touch with real Norwegian life, which he studied in the convex mirror ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... stature with a slight and elegant figure set off by a traveling suit of irreproachable cut. His light reddish-yellow hair, mustache, and sunburned cheek, which seemed all of one color and outline, made it impossible to detect the gray of the one or the hollowness of the other, and gave no indication of his age. Yet there was clearly no mistake. Here was Gabriel Lane seizing their nervously cold fingers and presenting them ...
— Sally Dows and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... lonely in the old place before, for there was companionship even in the memory of her dead, but this evening as she sat on the porch, the familiar objects in the yard growing dim through the oncoming night, the hollowness of desolation was there. Joe was in prison. The neighbors had refused to believe the word of her boy. There was nobody to help him but her. The hand of everybody else was against him. She had delivered him into bondage and brought this ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... fabrications, whose falsehood they might detect by the exercise of any ordinary acuteness, and should risk their reputation with the world by professing to believe these fictions. If we are sincere in our faith, it is impossible to suppose us so willing to be imposed upon. The hollowness of these supernatural pretensions must have betrayed itself to some amongst us. The bubble must have burst somewhere. If not at Rome, where Protestants imagine Catholic intellect to be at its lowest ...
— The Life of St. Frances of Rome, and Others • Georgiana Fullerton
... Mrs. Gresley, "it has always been our aim to be independent, not to bow down before any one. If I am unworldly, it is because I had the advantage of parents who impressed on me the hollowness of all social distinctions. If the Pratts were given a title to-morrow I should behave exactly the same to ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... the author has disclosed the inward disease, the fearful hollowness, the spiritual death, of the nation's philosophical and theological forms, with resistless eloquence; and like the Jews of old, they will exclaim, "That man is ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... economical, and brilliantly effective," H.L. Mencken admits.[6] "Yet the same hollowness that marks the American novel," he continues, "also marks the short story." And of "many current makers of magazine short stories," he asseverates, "such stuff has no imaginable relation to life as men live it in the world." He further ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... the fair Frances, and ridiculing old Rowley, to gratify their hostess. She knew them by heart—their falsehood and hollowness. She knew that they were ready, every one of them, to steal her royal lover, had they but the chance of such a conquest; yet it solaced her soreness to hear Miss Stewart depreciated even by those ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... was said to be a hard man, and in some respects this was certainly the case; but a faint flush crept into his grim face. Perhaps he had noticed the weariness in Nasmyth's voice or the hollowness ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss
... to discover our boy's whereabouts, when, by the same mail, I am advised by him that he is on board the very boat of which you claim to be Captain and owner. I of course take my boy's word in preference to that of any stranger. Having thus detected the hollowness of your sympathy, and the falseness of your pretended friendship for my husband, I must request you to refrain from further meddling in ...
— Raftmates - A Story of the Great River • Kirk Munroe
... and will not be caught, and for which reflection comes too late. No one knows this as well as the philosopher. He must fire his volley of new vocables out of his conceptual shotgun, for his profession condemns him to this industry, but he secretly knows the hollowness and irrelevancy. His formulas are like stereoscopic or kinetoscopic photographs seen outside the instrument; they lack the depth, the motion, the vitality. In the religious sphere, in particular, belief that formulas are true can never wholly ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... the sad but caustic philosophy produced by satiety. In the life she led, neither her heart nor her head was engaged; the faculties of both were irritated, not satisfied or employed. She felt somewhat too sensitively the hollowness of the great world, and had a low opinion of human nature. In fact, she was a woman of the French memoirs—one of those charming and spirituelles Aspasias of the boudoir, who interest us by their subtlety, tact, and grace, their exquisite tone of refinement, ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... her vexation. A gentleman! The cant word, the fetish of this ring of idle aristocrats—she knew the hollowness of the whole farce. The democrat in her made her walk off with erect head and bright eyes, leaving a penitent boy behind; while all the time a sick, longing heart drove her to the ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... language, as you yourself have heard, is very contracted and poor, without inflection or expression, being nothing but the repetition of the same sounds, by which means—that is simply by the number and the depth of hollowness of the same monosyllables—they convey their wishes to each other. It is, indeed, wonderful how they can do so, and our learned men, from this circumstance, have held that the language of the wood-pigeon is the most difficult to acquire, ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... weighty matters), and go by his advice still; and in his best consideration recall this hideous rashness: for he would answer with his life, his judgment that Lear's youngest daughter did not love him least, nor were those empty-hearted whose low sound gave no token of hollowness. When power bowed to flattery, honour was bound to plainness. For Lear's threats, what could he do to him, whose life was already at his service? That should not hinder ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... blank despondency that had settled on him more heavily than ever, a token that he was shut out from all that was good,—nay, that in former years there had been no true joy in him, only enjoyment of temporal pleasure? Had his best days of happiness been, then, nothing but hollowness ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... learning and acuteness, and far his superior in subtlety and dialectic skill; who, though an Anglican, scorned the name of Protestant; and, while yet a Churchman, made it his business, to parade, with infinite skill, the utter hollowness of the arguments of those of his brother Churchmen who dreamed that they could be both Anglicans and Protestants. The argument of the "Essay on the Miracles recorded in the Ecclesiastical History of the Early Ages" [60] by the present [1889] Roman Cardinal, ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... the hollowness of the whole thing, and took Hemangini by the hand and led her to my own room. I gently stroked her face and arms and hair, and found that she was about fifteen ...
— The Hungry Stones And Other Stories • Rabindranath Tagore
... ecclesiastical malignity of the most frantic kind. There are parts of Mr. Froude's volumes which we have read with real pleasure, with real admiration. But the book, as a whole, is vicious in its conception, vicious in its execution. No merit of detail can atone for the hollowness that runs through the whole. Mr. Froude has written twelve volumes, and he has made himself a name in writing them, but he has not written, in the pregnant phrase so aptly quoted by the Duke of Aumale, ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... some tens or hundreds or millions of centuries, when all human consciousness shall have ceased to exist. And these motives for living and working, this thing which some call humanism, are the amazing products of the affective and emotional hollowness of rationalism and of its stupendous hypocrisy—a hypocrisy bent on sacrificing sincerity to veracity, and sworn not to confess that reason is a dissolvent ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... holiest thing on earth. It has come, this ethical Church, to reinforce the wholly forgotten teaching of the Hebrew prophets of the utter emptiness of all religion devoid of moral life, the vanity of sacrifices, oblations and rites, the hollowness of formularies, creeds and confessions, the indispensable necessity of an ethical basis for all religious belief and practice. "What more," asks Micah, "doth the Lord require of thee than to do justice, love mercy, and to ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... and on through the leafy woods, trundling the basket behind him. Nothing had gone wrong; indeed, everything had been much easier than he could have hoped. Perhaps it was the weariness that had crept into his legs, and the hollowness that began to appear in his stomach; but, somehow, although in the morning he had expected to find Gay's new mothers beckoning from every window, so that he could scarcely choose between them, he now felt as if the whole race of ...
— Timothy's Quest - A Story for Anybody, Young or Old, Who Cares to Read It • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... on the outside, and white within like Milk, and in the end of Summer becometh hard and woody. Whether this be the very same kind, I cannot affirm, but both the Picture and Description come very neer to that I have, but that he seems not to take notice of the hollowness or Worm, for which 'tis most observable. And therefore 'tis very likely, if men did but take notice, they might find very many differing Species of these Nuts, Ovaries, or Matrixes, and all of them to have much the same designation and office. And I have very ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... of 'The Fable of the Bees; or, Private Vices, Public Benefits' (1714). This work is a satire upon artificial society, having for its chief aim to expose the hollowness of the so-called dignity of human nature. Dugald Stewart considered it a recommendation to any theory of the mind that it exalted our conceptions of human nature. Shaftesbury's views were entitled to this advantage; but, observes Mandeville, 'the ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... thus it will be: You see a tremendous tower-like pine-tree in the forest; it seems as it will stand there forever; but strike it fairly with your axe and it will reveal hollowness and punk will come out. So is it with the strength of the Knights of the Cross. But I commanded you to tell me what you have done and what you have accomplished there. Let me see, you said you fought there with weapons, did ...
— The Knights of the Cross • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... metal known on earth, was his conclusion. It was right-named by the ones of old-time as the Star-Born. Only from the stars could it have come, and no thing of chance was it. It was a creation of artifice and mind. Such perfection of form, such hollowness that it certainly possessed, could not be the result of mere fortuitousness. A child of intelligences, remote and unguessable, working corporally in metals, it indubitably was. He stared at it in amaze, his brain a racing wild-fire of hypotheses to account for this far-journeyer who had adventured ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... of common humanity. The girl was miserably poor, and had aged parents and brothers and sisters dependent on her exertions; but her Christian employer paid her the lowest possible price, and trampled on her feelings as though she had been a brute. Oh, the hollowness of the religion I saw practiced! I sneered at everything connected with churches, and heard no more sermons, which seemed only to make hypocrites and pharisees of the congregation. I have never known but one exception. Mrs. Asbury is a consistent ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... then, France suffered far more heavily than the Allies. Their losses elude the inquiries of the statistician. They consisted in the utter discredit of the royalist cause throughout France, the resentment that ever follows on clumsy or disloyal co-operation, and the revelation of the hollowness of the imposing fabric of the First Coalition. In the south of France four nations failed to hold a single fortress which her own sons had ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... have been human if incidents like these had not caused him pain. Occasionally he would give vent to his grief, but his manly courage, too, would soon assert itself, and he would expose the hollowness, insincerity, and futility of the lying tales that were spread about him. At a public meeting in Campo Flore he was cursed, sentenced to death, and burned in effigy. (21a, 174.) He has read offensive reports about himself, and puts them down with the calm declaration: ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... the English general had learned at once the hollowness of the Spanish promises. He had been assured of an ample supply of food, mules, and carts for transport; and had, on the strength of these statements, advanced with but small supplies, for little food and but few animals could be obtained in Portugal. He found, on arriving, ...
— Under Wellington's Command - A Tale of the Peninsular War • G. A. Henty
... Deriving scarcely anything from France, deeply in debt, and with credit exhausted, she found herself entirely at the end of her resources. How thoroughly did the banished woman then realise the woes of exile—how hard it is to climb and descend the stranger's stair, experience the hollowness of his promise, and the arrogance of his commiseration. And, finally, as though fated to drain her cup of bitterness to the last drop, to learn that she, her long-loved bosom friend and royal mistress, who owed her, at the very least, a silent ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... houses of the country are everywhere built of beams of fir-trees; the lower beams do so receive the round hollowness of the uppermost, that by the means of the building thereupon they resist and expel all winds that blow, and where the timber is joined together, there they stop the chinks with moss. The form and fashion of their houses in all places is four-square, with straight and narrow windows, whereby with ...
— The Discovery of Muscovy etc. • Richard Hakluyt
... Mr. Pryme envied the sparrows, who were ready clothed by Providence, and had no rates and taxes to pay, as well as the clerks, who, at all events, had plenty to do and no time to soliloquize upon the hardness and hollowness of life. To have plenty of brains, and an indefinite amount of spare time to use them in; to desire ardently to hasten along the road towards fortune and happiness, and to be forced to sit idly by whilst others, duller-witted, perchance, and with less capacity for work, ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... privacy of his room, when no eye was on him, he drank, drank. He paid strict enough attention to my education. I read with him much; he had stores of books. I read the Bible with him, too; often he spent long evenings expounding it to me. But I saw the hollowness of it all—he hardly believed himself; he doubted—doubted all, while he would fain have made me a believer. I saw it well: I heard him rave of it in a fever into which drink had thrown him. All was dark to him, he said, when he ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... 23 deg. 6' and the distance made from Wreck-Reef Bank, ninety miles. The wind freshened in the afternoon, and a cross sea rose which obliged us to reef the sails, and made the boat very wet. At four we close reefed and hauled to the wind, but this was not enough; the increased hollowness of the waves caused the boat to labour so much, that every plunge raised an apprehension that some of the planks would start from the timbers. Having no other resource, we emptied one of the two casks of water, threw over-board ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis Volume 2 • Matthew Flinders
... to witness how all kinds of incapacities, stupidities, how meanness, hollowness, heartlessness, all incarnated in politicians, in trimmers, in narrow brained; how all of them ride on the shoulders of the masses, and use them for their sordid, mean, selfish and ambitious ends. And the masses are superior to those riders in everything constituting ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... understood, I believe, by our good people. He has a bold, original, independent mind, thoroughly American. He loves his country and her principles most ardently; he knows the hollowness of all the despotic systems of Europe, and especially is he thoroughly conversant with the heartless, false, selfish system of Great Britain; the perfect antipodes of our own. He fearlessly supports American principles in the face of all ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... haply thou hast forced thy bark Up this strong stream, whose broken waters here Send pleasant murmurs to the listening sense: Rest thee beneath this hazel; its green boughs Afford a grateful shade, and to the eye Fair is its fruit: Stranger! the seemly fruit Is worthless, all[1] is hollowness within, For on the grave of ROSAMUND it grows! Young lovely and beloved she fell seduced, And here retir'd to wear her wretched age In earnest prayer and bitter penitence, Despis'd and self-despising: think of her Young Man! and learn ...
— Poems • Robert Southey
... rarely found among us. In its stead are programs, methods, organizations and a world of nervous activities which occupy time and attention but can never satisfy the longing of the heart. The shallowness of our inner experience, the hollowness of our worship, and that servile imitation of the world which marks our promotional methods all testify that we, in this day, know God only imperfectly, and the peace of ...
— The Pursuit of God • A. W. Tozer
... his celebrated Letter to Lord Chesterfield, says, in reference to the hollowness of patronage: "The shepherd, in Virgil, grew at last acquainted with Love; and found him a native of the rocks." To what passage in Virgil does Johnson here refer, and what is the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 203, September 17, 1853 • Various
... overthwart and in breadth, in the which the spirit is drawn from the heart. Wherefore they be harder without than all the other veins, and that is needful lest they break lightly and soon. Also these veins spring out of the left hollowness of the heart. And twain of that side are called Pulsative, of which one that is the innermost hath a nesh skin, and this vein is needful to bring great quantity of blood and spirits to the lungs, and to receive in air, and to medley it with blood, ...
— Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus • Robert Steele
... of the conception; the miser here collects the parings of his nails and laments the tears which he sheds as a waste of water. But the blame of this want of depth in the portraying of character, and generally of the whole poetical and moral hollowness of this newer comedy, lay less with the comic writers than with the nation as a whole. Everything distinctively Greek was expiring: fatherland, national faith, domestic life, all nobleness of action and sentiment ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... diver's helmet was a thick glass face-piece. This had an opening, closed by a cap, which could be unscrewed, and through which I could breathe when above water, and also through which my voice would come, causing a peculiar hollowness which I guessed would have a very startling effect, especially as I myself would be quite invisible. I got into the lock, and shouted to Pegg. I succeeded in frightening him; he hurried to do what I ordered. He wound up the lower sluice, I shot through under water, ...
— A Master of Mysteries • L. T. Meade
... stainless heart, no shadow of sin; his old age was a peaceful day which lasted until sunset. He was a creature that had no falsetto in a single fibre of his being, no shadow of affectation. He kept like this through all our complicated existence in this artificial world, absolutely unconscious of the hollowness and pretension and sham that surrounded him—tolerant, too, and kind to all. Then why mourn for him? He ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... "the next century shall make up for it; for then we will contrive deep philosophies, take up one theory after another, and find out its hollowness and inadequacy, and fling it aside, the rotten rubbish that they all are, until we have strewn the whole realm of human thought with the broken fragments, all smashed up. And then, on this great mound of broken potsherds (like that great Monte Testaccio, which we will go ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... defender. She has a standing army also for the extension and the protection of her dominions. She levies taxes, too, and sends out ambassadors, and makes treaties, and forms offensive and defensive alliances. But what a bubble all this World is to him whose eyes have at last been opened to see the hollowness and the heartlessness of it all! For all its pursuits and all its possessions, from a child's rattle to a king's sceptre, all is one great bubble. Wealth, fame, place, power; art, science, letters; politics, churches, sacraments, and scriptures—all are so many bubbles in Madam Bubble's ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... Antioch, the seat of his late government, and was there decapitated. Meantime Albinus, the British commander-in-chief, had already been won over by the title of Caesar, or adopted heir to the new Augustus. But the hollowness of this bribe soon became apparent, and the two competitors met to decide their pretensions at Lyons. In the great battle which followed, Severus fell from his horse, and was at first supposed to be dead. But recovering, ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... along the banks of these two streams. The country around it is a vast treeless prairie, upon which scarcely a shrub is to be seen; but a thick coat of grass covers it throughout its entire extent, with the exception of a few spots where the hollowness of the ground has collected a little moisture, or the meandering of some small stream or rivulet enriches the soil, and covers its banks with verdant shrubs ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... The letter V, symbolical of the inverted pyramid, where it is an initial, nearly always denotes excellence of power; as Vril, of which I have said so much; Veed, an immortal spirit; Veed-ya, immortality; Koom, pronounced like the Welsh Cwm, denotes something of hollowness. Koom itself is a cave; Koom-in, a hole; Zi-koom, a valley; Koom-zi, vacancy or void; Bodh-koom, ignorance (literally, knowledge-void). Koom-posh is their name for the government of the many, or the ascendancy of the most ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... bliss on their faces that I've nearly cried for pure joy and sympathy. But in my heart all the time I felt that this was weakness and folly; that what was bliss to the mother, stupefying her for a while to the hollowness and emptiness of her existence, was the beginning of a probable life of misery to the child that could end only with death. And I have vowed to myself that never should child of mine have cause to reproach ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... said the School-Master. "He is full of pretence and hollowness, but he is sometimes ...
— The Idiot • John Kendrick Bangs
... the moment, but inherited from our fathers, our confessions which have no penitence, our praises without gratitude, our vows which we never mean to keep, and our creeds which in no operative fashion we believe—all the hollowness of profession with no reality below it, like a great cooled bubble on a lava stream, would crash in and go to powder if once we really believed what we so glibly say—that Jesus Christ was looking at us. He keeps silence to-day, but as surely as He knows us now, so surely ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... his chest heaving. Scotty stopped beside him. There was no sound. Even the night noises of the forest had ceased. There was a weird feeling of hollowness in the air, as though they stood in some great cavern. Rick ...
— The Blue Ghost Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... and empty save for a few horizontal bars far down in the sunset. Well, that night the expectation took the colour of my fears. In that darkling calm my senses seemed preternaturally sharpened. I fancied I could even feel the hollowness of the ground beneath my feet: could, indeed, almost see through it the Morlocks on their ant-hill going hither and thither and waiting for the dark. In my excitement I fancied that they would receive my invasion of their burrows as a declaration of war. And ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... too happy," said the proud mother; "you will now be all I have ever predicted for you;" and, in her joy at the moment, she forgot the hectic of his cheek, and the hollowness of his eye. ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of very young children, this could not possibly be taken seriously. The least observant normal boy or girl would recognize the hollowness of the pessimism that prevents an old man from at least an attempt to ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... said the mother, in a tone of distress, "what is to be the end of your inordinate ambition for the things of the world? You have got to discover the vanity and hollowness of them some time, but what must you suffer on your way to this experience! Money and position cannot bring happiness in marriage. Nothing ...
— A Manifest Destiny • Julia Magruder
... happened to Mr. Polly that real Romance came out of dreamland into life, and intoxicated and gladdened him with sweetly beautiful suggestions—and left him. She came and left him as that dear lady leaves so many of us, alas! not sparing him one jot or one tittle of the hollowness of her ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... pupils to walk in the paths which you tread. But no clearness and faithfulness in religious teaching will atone for the injury which a bad example will effect. Conduct speaks louder than words, and no persons are more shrewd than the young, to discover the hollowness of empty professions, and the heartlessness of mere ...
— The Teacher - Or, Moral Influences Employed in the Instruction and - Government of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... wrong, it was evident that Michael was in earnest. He spoke warmly, but with a natural vehemence that by no means disfigured his good-looking visage, now illuminated with unusual fire. In these days of hollowness and hypocrisy, an ingenuous straightforward character is a refreshing spectacle, and commands our admiration, be the principles it represents just what they may. Hence, possibly, the unaffected pleasure with which Margaret listened ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... shap'd like the end of a Horses Yard. Of their Shells, the Peak or Wampum is made, which is the richest Commodity amongst the Indians. They breed like a long Thing shap'd like a Snake, but containing a sort of Joints, in the Hollowness whereof are thousands of small Coaks, no bigger then ...
— A New Voyage to Carolina • John Lawson
... own comfort and strength. We need it to deliver us from the vanity and hollowness, the fever and hysteria of the present age. We need it to make us better soldiers and workers for every good cause. Peace is coming to all the earth some day through Christ. And those who shall do most to help Him bring it are the ...
— What Peace Means • Henry van Dyke
... the hollowness of hell Sounded as its master fell, And the mourning echo rolled Ruin through his kingdom old. Tyranny and terror flown Left a pair of friends alone, And beneath the nether sky All that stirred was he ...
— Last Poems • A. E. Housman
... no keenness for Pilate to see the hollowness of this sudden loyalty to Caesar. He returns to the beautiful marble judgment hall, and has Jesus brought to him again. He looks into Jesus' face. He is keen enough to see that here is no political ...
— Quiet Talks about Jesus • S. D. Gordon
... brought to see the hollowness of the contention that 'Pure Reason' can ignore its psychological context and dehumanize itself. A thought, to be thought at all, must seem worth thinking to someone, it must convey the meaning he intends, it must be true in his eyes and relevant to his ...
— Pragmatism • D.L. Murray
... found the pretty and vivacious Comtesse de Flahaut little to his taste, the society of which she was a type offended him still more. It had taken him but a short time to realize what shams, what hollowness, what corruption existed beneath the brilliant and gay surface. Amiability, charm, wit, grace were to be found everywhere in their perfection, but nowhere was truth, or sincerity, or real pleasure. All things were perverted. ...
— Calvert of Strathore • Carter Goodloe
... in you already," said the warm-hearted old Chevalier, "one whom I love. There is something frank in your eyes which raises memories of my dead son. In you I see both my offspring's and my own youth recalled to me. You are Canadian—in you I can banish the coldness, hollowness, and degeneracy of Europe. Replace my boy. Let me call you 'Germain' ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... as such thoughts are, they are not all the truth. So the prayer changes in tone, even while its substance is the same. He rises from the shows of earth to his true home, driven thither by their hollowness. "My hope is in Thee." The conviction of earth's vanity is all different when it has "tossed him to Thy breast." The pardoned sinner, who never thereafter forgot his grievous fall, asks for deliverance "from all his transgressions." The sullen silence has changed ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... these men of birth The hollowness of rank on earth." The agent answered, "Very true— But I should not, if ...
— More Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... poem on the South Sea mania. That which was written in 1721, and is called "South Sea," is a wonder of wit and wisdom. It shows the hollowness of the scheme in some new, odd, and striking light in every metaphor and every verse. "A guinea," Swift reminds his readers, "will not pass at market for a farthing more, shown through a multiplying glass, than what it always ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... Polly the role she had undertaken. Frieda sat quite near her, and watched her pretty bright movements with gentle interest, maintaining a silence meanwhile only surpassed in completeness by Dot's. Hannah rattled on, but there was a hollowness in the rattle that made Catherine's hostess heart falter. She was never fluent, herself. Her gentle art consisted in making her guests entertain ...
— The Wide Awake Girls in Winsted • Katharine Ellis Barrett
... composer. Advantage has also been taken of the difference between its high and low tones, and now in some romantic music, as in Raff's "Lenore" symphony, or the prayer of Agathe in "Der Freischuetz," the hollowness of the low tones produces a mysterious effect that is exceedingly striking. Still the fact remains that the native voice of the instrument, though sweet, is expressionless compared with that of the oboe or clarinet. Modern composers sometimes write for three flutes; but in the older writers, ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... praise the golden silence of the Dark Ages and be talking all the time. And surely the hourly failure to act up to your principles, the hourly and conscious apostacy from your ideal, could beget nothing in the character but hollowness and weakness. No student of history can fail to see the moral interest of the Middle Ages, any more than an artist can fail to see their aesthetic interest. There were some special types of noble character ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... imagination, now again not wholly at rest, there was something so hollow in the Spaniard's manner, with apparently some reciprocal hollowness in the servant's dusky comment of silence, that the idea flashed across him, that possibly master and man, for some unknown purpose, were acting out, both in word and deed, nay, to the very tremor of Don Benito's limbs, some juggling ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... had been smooth and uneventful; he had yet to test the hollowness of human happiness, to learn that the highest sort of life is not merely to be cradled in luxury and to fare sumptuously every day. The purple and fine linen are good enough in their way, and the myrrh and the aloes and the ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... that morbid condition, you would know that there is more reason to mourn over it than to laugh at it. There is acute misery felt now and then; and there is a pervading, never-departing sense of the hollowness of the morbid mirth. It is but a very few degrees better than "moody madness, laughing wild, amid severest woe." By depression of spirits I understand a dejection without any cause that could be stated, or from causes which in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... know very well that Mr. Westonhaugh cares nothing about it, one way or the other. The little plan for 'amusing brother John' is a hoax. The thing cannot be done. You might as well try to amuse an undertaker as to make a man from Bombay laugh. The hollowness of life is ever upon them. No. It was Kildare; he called and said that Miss Westonhaugh had never seen a tiger, and he seemed anxious to impress upon me his determination that she should. Pshaw! what does Kildare care ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... of size and vivacity, seem to us legitimately inferable from the conditions to continued vital activity. Given the physical and chemical data, and these structural peculiarities may be deduced with as much certainty as may the hollowness of an iron ball from its ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... have been deceived. For as that man cannot set a right value upon health who has never known sickness, nor feel the blessing of ease who has been through his life a stranger to pain, so can there be no confirmed and passionate love of truth for him who has not experienced the hollowness of error. Range against each other as advocates, oppose as combatants, two several intellects, each strenuously asserting doctrines which he sincerely believes; but the one contending for the worth and beauty of that ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... as they move, Echoes sweet be gently drove Thorough heaven's vast hollowness, Which unto all corners press: Music that the heart of Jove Moves to joy and sportful love; Fills the listening sailers' ears Riding on the wandering spheres: Neither speech nor language is Where their ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... drearier still; for it is Italy, fully more than the poet, that may be regarded as speaking in the following lines, which furnish evidence that, along with Dante, and all the great minds of the period, Torquato Tasso had seen the hollowness of the Papal Church, and felt the galling bondage which that Church inflicts on both the intellect ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... highest cliff; I hear the sound Of dashing waves; I gaze intent around; I mark the gray cope, and the hollowness Of heaven, and the great sun, that comes to bless The isles again; but my long-straining eye, No speck, no shadow can, far off, descry, That I might weep tears of delight, and say, It is the bark that bore my child away! Sun, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... is sufficient to excite it. From the palaces of kings—from the tents of warriors, he comes—equally at home with man in all aspects—to the cotter's hearth:—he bids us turn from the pomp of the Plantagenets to bow the knee to the poor Jew's daughter—he makes us sicken at the hollowness of the royal Rothsay, to sympathize with the honest love of Hugh the smith. No never was there one—not even Burns himself—who forced us more intimately to acknowledge, or more ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 569 - Volume XX., No. 569. Saturday, October 6, 1832 • Various
... blanket, his eyes bright as though with fever or fear. The skin of his face where it was seen through the black stubble of beard looked yellow with sickness. The cheek bones stood out sharply, little pools of shadow emphasizing the hollowness of his sunken cheeks. Above the waist he was stripped to his undershirt; a rude bandage under the shirt was stained the reddish brown of dried blood. A quick pity drove the distrust out of the eyes of the man who ...
— Six Feet Four • Jackson Gregory
... a vision. I saw a door—shut, ominous. Before that door stood a woman, tall, pale, beautiful. She was there to enter, but to what no mortal living could say. She saw nothing but loss and the hollowness of a living death behind that ...
— The Millionaire Baby • Anna Katharine Green
... not now regret, for their simple recollection acted as a most wholesome antidote to temptation. They had inscribed on my reason the conviction that unlawful pleasure, trenching on another's rights, is delusive and envenomed pleasure—its hollowness disappoints at the time, its poison cruelly tortures afterwards, its effects ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... awoke for this young partner of mine in his innocent, trustful love for a girl that even in her humble station was far beyond his hopes, and I pitied myself in him. Home, fortune, friends, I no longer cared for—all were forgotten. And now they are returning to me—only that I may see the hollowness and vanity of them, and taste the bitterness for which I have sacrificed you. And here, on this last night of my exile, I am confronted with only the jealousy, the doubt, the meanness and selfishness that is to ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... any such American woman in Congress? I mention Elizabeth, Maria Theresa, Catherine, and all the famous Empresses and Queens, not to prove the capacity of women for the most arduous and responsible office, for that is undeniable, but to show the hollowness of the assertion that there is an instinctive objection to the fulfillment of such offices by women. Men who say so do not really think so. The whole history of the voting and office-holding of women shows that whenever men's theories ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... unusually well, but he was the only one who sighed deeply after the good man's departure. Rising from the depths of his soul through his false exhilaration was a low, threatening voice, saying, "That man is true; you are a sham, and your hollowness will ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... decision. Let us imagine that, in the House of Commons, for example, the first hour at each meeting should be occupied with the divisions growing out of the previous day's debates. The consequences would be enormous, but would any of them be bad? The hollowness of the oral debate as a means of persuasion would doubtless receive a blasting exposure; many would come up to vote, few would remain to listen to speeches. The greater number of those that cared to know what was said, would rest satisfied with the ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... in the pan, vox et praeterea nihil [Lat.]. shadow; phantom &c (fallacy of vision) 443; dream &c (imagination) 515; ignis fatuus &c (luminary) 423 [Lat.]; such stuff as dreams are made of [Tempest]; air, thin air, vapor; bubble &c 353; baseless fabric of a vision [Tempest]; mockery. hollowness, blank; void &c (absence) 187. inanity, fool's paradise. V. vanish, evaporate, fade, dissolve, melt away; disappear &c 449. Adj. unsubstantial; baseless, groundless; ungrounded; without foundation, having no foundation. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... deeply than was his wont. In spite—or perhaps in consequence—of his abasement, forlornness, and unworthiness, he showed a dignity and impressiveness which were novel in him. The boyishness, vivacity, and motion, had quite vanished. There were a depth and hollowness in his eyes which gave a singular power to his face. There must have been a vein of genuine strength and nobleness in the man, or he would have been too much crushed to show any thing but weak despair or ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... their poles before venturing their weight; the heat was intense, and made us glad to find ourselves again on terra firma, if that expression may be allowed where the walking was exceedingly disagreeable, owing to the hollowness of the lava, formed in great bubbles, that continually broke and let us in up to our knees. This dike has probably been formed by the drainage of the volcano by a lateral vent, as the part of the crater which it confines has sunk lower than that outside it, and the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... Alone in the world, he was sighing bitterly, when he awoke with a start. All had taken place in so short a space of time that Han Chung-li's wine was not yet hot. This is the incident referred to in Chinese literature in the phrase 'rice-wine dream.' Convinced of the hollowness of worldly dignities, he followed Han Chung-li to the Ho Ling Mountains at Chung-nan in Shensi, where he was initiated into the divine mysteries, and ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... whom his own interests were much; he was unscrupulous; he was ostentatious; he was not above stooping to mean, unmanly compliances with the humours of the Queen. But he was a man with a higher ideal than he attempted to follow. He saw, not without cynical scorn, through the shows and hollowness of the world. His intellect was of that clear and unembarrassed power which takes in as wholes things which other men take in part by part. And he was in its highest form a representative of that spirit of adventure into the unknown and the wonderful of which ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... and natural, that the newcomers felt as if they had only left it yesterday. Fordham, having thrown off his wraps, waited on his guests, looking exceedingly happy in his quiet way, but more fragile than ever. He had a good deal of fair beard, but it could not conceal the hollowness of his cheeks, and there were great caves round his eyes, which were very bright and blue. Yet he was called well, waited assiduously on little Lina, and talked ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... was possible to see that sinister red streak that follows the firing of a gun at night. The rain gave a peculiar hollowness to the concussion. The Belgian and ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... weary of the hollowness of the world, for it cannot satisfy. I one day talked with a woman in Massachusetts whose opportunity to mingle with the so-called best people of the world had been unexcelled. She had been a chosen and welcomed guest in the homes of royalty ...
— And Judas Iscariot - Together with other evangelistic addresses • J. Wilbur Chapman
... Thackeray and a Beckett joined later in the sport. But Jerrold, while believing in Thackeray's hatred of the snob, more than suspected him of being a snob himself; and Thackeray felt not less convinced of the hollowness of Jerrold's "stalwartness." "Thackeray had neither love nor respect for Jerrold's democracy," Vizetelly tells us. "I remember him mentioning to me his having noticed at the Earl of Carlisle's a presentation copy of one of Jerrold's books, the inscription ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... forest rude Picking the scattered remnants of its wood. If human, thou mightst then have learned to grieve. The gleanings of precarious charity Her scantiness of food did scarce supply. 30 The proofs of an unspeaking sorrow dwelt Within her ghastly hollowness of eye: Each arrow of the season's change she felt. Yet still she groans, ere yet her race were run, One only hope: it was—once more ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... introduction to his writings. There are no illusions in it, and, to a young reader fresh from Scott's romances or Dickens's sympathetic extravagances, it will seem hard and repellant. But men who, like Thackeray, have seen life and tasted its bitterness and felt its hollowness, know how to prize it. Thackeray does not merely expose the cant, the emptiness, the self-seeking, the false pretenses, flunkeyism, and snobbery—the "mean admiration of mean things"—in the great world of London society: his keen, unsparing vision ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... artist? What fell words were those, expressive of what a galling hollowness, of what a bitter mockery! I—I—I—am the artist. I was the real artist of Piccadilly, I was the real artist of the Waterloo Road, I am the only artist of all those pavement-subjects which daily and nightly arouse your admiration. I do 'em, and I let 'em out. The man you behold with the papers of ...
— Somebody's Luggage • Charles Dickens
... spiritual world, and the duty of living for it, as also the certainty of holding intercommunion with the spirits. The 'Other worldliness' of the mediaeval monastic mysticism had produced a revolt against a conception of life that was false, its passive hostility to civilisation, the hollowness of its ideal existence, its exaggerated asceticism, its disparagement of the family life, and the result was the swing of the pendulum in the opposite direction. The recoil came with the Methodists. But we cannot ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... trac'd most plainly. Who would deem, that scent Of water and an apple, could have prov'd Powerful to generate such pining want, Not knowing how it wrought? While now I stood Wond'ring what thus could waste them (for the cause Of their gaunt hollowness and scaly rind Appear'd not) lo! a spirit turn'd his eyes In their deep-sunken cell, and fasten'd then On me, then cried with vehemence aloud: "What grace is this vouchsaf'd me?" By his looks I ne'er had recogniz'd him: but ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... absolutely indispensable to the growth of love, but they are, very often, its powerful auxiliaries. 'Out of sight, out of mind,' is well enough as a proverb applicable to cases of friendship, though absence is not always necessary to hollowness of heart, even between friends, and truth and honesty, like precious stones, are perhaps most easily imitated at a distance, when the counterfeits often pass for real. Love, however, is very materially assisted by a warm and active imagination: which ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... action, would have inflicted an enduring injury upon the British cause in South Africa for which the enfranchisement itself would have been small compensation. The disclosure of these methods and, with them, of the hollowness of Rhodes's alliance with the Afrikander Bond, alarmed and incensed the whole Dutch population of South Africa. What this meant Lord Rosmead knew, and Mr. Chamberlain did not know. The ten years' truce between ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... an inert mass at the base of the incline. Yellow dust like the gloom of the cave, but not so changeless, drifted away on the wind; the roar clapped in echo from the cliff, returned, went back, and came again to die in the hollowness. Down on the sunny terrace there was a different atmosphere. Ring and Whitie leaped around Bess. Once more she was smiling, gay, and thoughtless, with the dream-mood in ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... horse he wanted with the aplomb he had acquired in dismissing undesirable beasts. The fact was he knew less about horses than when he began to buy, while he had indefinitely enlarged his idle knowledge of men, of their fatuity and hollowness. He learned that men whom he had always envied their brilliant omniscience in regard to horses, as they drove him out behind their dashing trotters, were quite ignorant and helpless in the art of buying; they always got somebody else to buy their horses for them. "Find a man you can trust," ...
— Buying a Horse • William Dean Howells
... how much I have been with you. When two serve together, one must command, and the other must obey. So far from complaining of these Hanoverian Boards, and First Lords, it seems to me that they have always kept in view the hollowness of their claims to the throne, and have felt a desire to purchase honest men ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... situated on the banks of the river Taf. In the neighbourhood of Newport, which is in the district of Gwentluc, {78} there is a small stream called Nant Pencarn, {79} passable only at certain fords, not so much owing to the depth of its waters, as from the hollowness of its channel and muddy bottom. The public road led formerly to a ford, called Ryd Pencarn, that is, the ford under the head of a rock, from Rhyd, which in the British language signifies a ford, Pen, the head, and Cam, a rock; ...
— The Itinerary of Archibishop Baldwin through Wales • Giraldus Cambrensis
... infirm old age, shews itself by talkativeness, boasting of the past, hollowness of the eyes and cheeks, dimness of sight, deafness, tremor of voice, the accents, through default of teeth, scarce intelligible; hams weak, knees tottering, head paralytic, hollow coughing, frequent expectoration, breathless wheezing, laborious ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... incident to human life, none is so penetrating to gentle hearts as that which fills them with aching regrets, and, for a time, writes hollowness and vanity on their dearest treasures, when death robs them of those they love. And so, of all the questions that haunt the soul, wringing its faculties for a solution, beseeching the oracles of the universe for a response, ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... color, in all these beautiful traditions of whatever nation or clime; at the zenith of success, in the spring-time of youth and hope, on the very eve of joy unutterable, there often seizes on the soul of man an overwhelming sense of the hollowness and fleetingness of life. It is this touch of the spiritual which raises these old heroic poems to such sublime beauty and power. Poetry of this kind implies a nation, one which is still, or has been, great; one which has a past, a legendary history, vivid recollections, and an ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... aching void in their hearts. The hazards of trade, the changes of political life, cause them to forget themselves, and so they are rocked into oblivion of internal disquiet by the toss of the ocean waves. They forget the hollowness of their own hearts, and cheat themselves into the belief that they are ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... was a sort of moral isolation, amid all this immorality, and, although she had learned suddenly to disseminate, although she received the comtesse with outstretched hand and smiling lips, she felt this consciousness of hollowness, this contempt for humanity increasing and enveloping her, and the petty gossip of the district gave her a still greater disgust, a still lower opinion ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... Sir Claude; but it was also just here that the little girl was able to recall the effect with which in earlier days she had practised the pacific art of stupidity. This art again came to her aid: her mother, in getting rid of her after an interview in which she had achieved a hollowness beyond her years, allowed her fully to understand she had not grown ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... two months after the flight to Palermo, the condition of affairs for the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was seemingly critical to the verge of desperation; for neither the preparations of the Coalition, nor the hollowness of the French successes, were understood, and news was slow to reach the remote city where the Court now dwelt. The republican movement extended, though superficially, to the toe of Italy, many of the towns in Calabria planting the tree ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... robes and coronet—the beadle in his gaudy livery of scarlet, and purple, and gold—the dignitary in the fulness of his pomp—the demagogue in the triumph of his hollowness—these and other visual and oral cheats by which mankind are cajoled, have passed in review before us, conjured up by the ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 1, July 17, 1841 • Various
... those who applied the philosophy of Condillac to morals. Each man's tastes are so far affected by circumstances, that it is possible that Helvetius's exclusive association with the selfish circles of the French society, which never lived for the good of others, together with the perception of the hollowness of the respect which persons paid him for his wealth and influence, led him to regard self-love as the sole motive of conduct. His philosophy is expressed in two works;(553) the one on the spirit, the other on man: the former a theoretical view of human nature, the ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... resounding With the cry that All was lost, Like the thunder-cracks of massy ice In intensity of frost— Bursting one upon another Through the horror of the calm. The paralysis of arm In the anguish of the heart; And the hollowness and dearth. The appealings of the mother To brother and to brother Not in hatred so to part— And the fissure in the hearth Growing momently more wide. Then the glances 'tween the Fates, And the doubt on every side, And the patience ...
— Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War • Herman Melville |
