"Meaningless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... civilization—the only justification of a great material one? Confess that to severe eyes, using the moral microscope upon humanity, a sort of dry and flat Sahara appears, these cities, crowded with petty grotesques, malformations, phantoms, playing meaningless antics. ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... was Simpkins, a clerk and a fop, Who sported a very luxuriant crop Of whiskers, cut clearly for 'cutting a dash,' And flanked by a stylishly twisted mustache, Adorning the uppermost part of the gash In his meaningless face, like a regular hedge Of russety foliage skirting the edge Of a cavern, containing a prominent ledge Of rocky projections, above and below (Though the charge was not 'cast in his teeth,' as I know). Arrayed, with intent to astonish ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... massacre, like that at Schenectady, or Deerfield. But these Indian surprises are not only revolting, but monotonous to weariness, and, as they accomplished nothing but a given number of murders, there is nothing to be learned from them. They are meaningless; and we can hardly imagine even the Grand Monarch, or William of Orange, being elated or depressed by ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... she contemplates her work. Justine sighs and arranges the furniture. Caroline picks off the yellow leaves of the plants in the windows. A woman, in these cases, disguises what we may call the prancings of the heart, by those meaningless occupations in which the fingers have all the grip of pincers, when the pink nails burn, and when this unspoken exclamation rasps the ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... and stood as one turned to marble. Minamee, his wife, sat on the gold hearth, her face and hands cut and blackened, her dress torn, her eyes glassy, a meaningless smile on her lips. In her arms she pressed the body of her infant, its dress soaked with blood, and the head of the little creature lay on the floor beside her. She crooned softly over the cold clay as if hushing it to sleep, and ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... more logical, more carefully reasoned, tends at times to render it less psychologically true. Each version has its own merits and its own faults, and in their appeal they are so radically different that a choice between them must always remain meaningless except on temperamental grounds. At one point, however—and an important one at that—the metrical version seems to ...
— Master Olof - A Drama in Five Acts • August Strindberg
... enshrined,[283] and as a natural consequence his books were among the classics in the church schools for a thousand years.[284] It is pathetic, however, to think of the medieval student trying to extract mental nourishment from a work so abstract, so meaningless, so unnecessarily complicated, ...
— The Hindu-Arabic Numerals • David Eugene Smith
... twilight of the last age, shall crouch before a deity of stone or wood; and never one of that long lineage have learnt the wherefore of his being. The prophets, the martyrs, their noble anguish vain and meaningless; the wise whose thought strove to eternity, and was but an idle dream; the pure in heart whose life was a vision of the living God, the suffering and the mourners whose solace was in a world to come, the victims ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... have inherited Christianity without Christ; we have the painted shell of a religion, and that which rattles around within it is not the burning soul of the Great Iconoclast, but a cold and shriveled and meaningless tradition. Oh! for the quick-pulsing, warm-beating, mighty human heart of the man of Galilee! Oh! for his uplifted hand, armed with a whip of scorpions, to depopulate the temples of the world, and lash his recreant preachers into devotion to the ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... expelled Baruch Benedict Spinoza from their synagogue. In our time there was a very learned magazine published in its behalf, and I heard David Starr Jordan say no man could tell whether it was a mere jargon of words, meaningless and empty, or whether monism was the profoundest philosophy the world has ...
— The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith
... smell lessened gradually. The meaningless flashings of preposterous color grew faint. The horrible uproar his auditory nerves reported, ceased. He and Jill had been at the mercy of the unseen operator of the terror beam. Perhaps the beam had grazed them, by accident. Or it could ...
— Operation Terror • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... intent upon the rapidly spoken message coming down to her over the wire. Her deep, hazel eyes were soberly regarding the blotting pad, upon which an idle pencil was describing a number of meaningless diagrams. ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... other end of it. We must begin at the beginning; we must return to our first origins in history, as we must return to our first principles in philosophy. We must consider how we came to be doing what we do, and even saying what we say. As it is, the very terms we use are either meaningless or something more than meaningless, inconsistent even with themselves. This applies, for instance, to the talk of both sides in that Labour controversy, which I merely took in passing, because it was the current controversy in London when I left. The Capitalists say Bolshevism ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... been other "voyages to the moon," but none of higher merit than the one just mentioned. That of Bergerac is utterly meaningless. In the third volume of the "American Quarterly Review" will be found quite an elaborate criticism upon a certain "journey" of the kind in question—a criticism in which it is difficult to say whether the critic most exposes the stupidity of the book, or his own absurd ignorance ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... interesting. Drama began in dance and developed from it, dance and drama going hand-in-hand for a long while; then a separation came, and dance has tended more and more to become meaningless and conventional, and, in the chief school of dancing, purely technical. The Spanish school is still alive, reinforced by the North African, and in the main showing some tendency, often perfectly restrained, ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... swiftly into the woodshed. Now a woodshed is a hideously unromantic sort of place. And there was nothing for Prudence to sit on, that Jerry might kneel at her feet. So they dispensed with formalities, and he held her in his arms for a long time, and kissed her often, and whispered sweet meaningless words that thrilled her as she listened. It may not have been comfortable, but it was evidently endurable, for it is a fact that they did not leave that woodshed for over an hour. Then they betook themselves ...
— Prudence of the Parsonage • Ethel Hueston
... vulgar, meaningless, familiar slang, they recalled their innumerable triumphs; for all three of them, according to their own stories, had been applauded, laden with laurel-wreaths, and carried in triumph by ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... and cows and horses were quite meaningless to him, but not quite so baffling as the odd little figures which appeared beneath and between the colored pictures—some strange kind of bug he thought they might be, for many of them had legs though nowhere could he find ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... slowly raising her enigmatical glance upon him. 'Do you know that's awfully flattering?' she added with a meaningless smile, while her eyes still kept the same ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... poverty of the nation, the proportion of gifts made for the erection and maintenance of these temples and shrines is a striking testimony to the reality of some sort of religious zeal. That it rests entirely on form and meaningless ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... precisely the same amiable, inconsequent manner. What his moments of solitude were, only he knew. The agony of grief through which he passed, the long sleepless nights, the heartbreaking sense of loss, these things lay hidden under his meaningless exterior, which, however, defied the revelation of ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... magnitude. The planets and satellites of Sol had proven comparatively tractable and those that were suited to man-life were quickly brought under his dominion. But there, of course, he had the advantage of proximity. The time involved in running back and forth to the home planet was meaningless and all Earth's resources could be ...
— Adaptation • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... some creed back of every deed; but when he puts his creed up in front his deeds soon die. Where words reign they soon reign alone, with nothing but words to serve them. Orthodoxy is so general, because it is so easy and so meaningless. Catch the accent and you are orthodox. But if heaven is to be won by an accent most honest men would ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... the middle and largest of which runs up to the lancet windows above it. It is difficult to believe that these arches and gables are not an addition later in date than the transept itself; they are so ugly and so meaningless, but they appear in the old prints of the minster, and the ancient clock, with two wooden statues in armour of the date of Henry VII., seems to have stood there from time immemorial. This clock was removed, with the statues, to make room for another at the beginning ...
— The Cathedral Church of York - Bell's Cathedrals: A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief - History of the Archi-Episcopal See • A. Clutton-Brock
... one another frantic words, almost meaningless, perhaps not even true, but at that moment it was all true, and they both believed what they ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... other times she had the air of a stern prophetess, with a threat in every "tick, tick", and a hint of doom in the striking of every hour. As she stood now in her brown cloak darkened by the moonlight, and her round meaningless face whitened by it, she recalled to Terry a remark once made by Granny, "Many a life she has ticked away out of this house, and out of this world, has that old great-grandfather's clock, ...
— Terry - Or, She ought to have been a Boy • Rosa Mulholland
... renegade, the man who had thrown all considerations of duty and feeling to the winds as so much lumber, so much meaningless conventionality, felt as shocked and disgusted as ever he could have done in his most foolish days, what time illusions were as vivid, as golden as ever. But, remembering himself, he replied ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... praise of his mother's dinner. She insisted upon aiding in the removal of plates from the table and for the most part her conversation was with Mrs. Gallant. What delicious salad, she must have the dressing recipe if Mrs. Gallant would be so kind as to give it to her. She told in details that were meaningless to John of the Spanish dishes her mother prepared, of the barbecue feasts of the old days ...
— Spring Street - A Story of Los Angeles • James H. Richardson
... showing acerbity, though she has none for practising cruelty. How could anybody expect a girl to turn out well after the usual course of workhouse training? The life of the soul is too often quenched; the flame of life in the poor body is dim and low; and the mechanical morality, the dull, meaningless round of useless lessons, the habit of herding in unhealthy rooms with unhealthy companions, all tend to develop a creature which can be regarded only as one of Nature's failures, if I may parody a phrase of the superlative ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... role upon the stage of the world was ended. He only desired now to be forgotten as quickly as possible, to lapse into mediocrity as easily and quietly as he could. Fame was nothing to him now. The thundering applause of an entire world that had once been his was mere noise, empty and meaningless. He did not care to reawaken it. The appearance of his book he knew was expected and waited for in every civilised nation of the globe. It would be printed in languages whereof he was ignorant, but it was all one ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... line of the lead on meaningless generalities. Get down to the facts at once. For instance, "The presence of mind and bravery of Fireman David Mullen saved Mrs. Daniel Looker from being burned to death in her flat, etc." We are willing to grant his bravery ...
— Newspaper Reporting and Correspondence - A Manual for Reporters, Correspondents, and Students of - Newspaper Writing • Grant Milnor Hyde
... two separate averments in the second chapter of Genesis, both entirely meaningless apart from the construction we here give it, that "out of the ground made the Lord God to grow" the vegetation of the earth, and "out of the ground" produced he (or caused to be produced) every beast of the ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... interest in familiar things Age after age, the barren and meaningless process All life seems to be sacred except human life But there are liars everywhere this year Capacity must be shown (in other work); in the law, concealment of it will do Christmas brings harassment and ...
— Quotations from the Works of Mark Twain • David Widger
... expression is meaningless as to a few instances; it is reasonable to think of some coincidence between the fall of hail and the fall of other things: but, inasmuch as there have been a good many instances,—we begin to suspect that this is not so much a book we're writing as a sanitarium for overworked coincidences. If not ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... interchange of wit, the society of the Townshends, the Walpoles, the Williamses, the Edgecumbes; all the jovial, keen wisdom of Gilly, and Dick, and Horace, and Charles, as they called one another, for the meaningless prattle, the merry laughter of this half-English, half-Italian child, It redeems Selwyn in our eyes, and it may have done him real good: nay, he must have felt a keen refreshment in this change from vice to innocence; and we understand ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... dog into the street; that is what he deserves. He probably followed me when I came away from the opera-house, and now he is trying to make capital out of a meaningless incident. Put him out, and don't permit him to pass the door again to-night; otherwise, he will seek to annoy a lady ...
— The Last Woman • Ross Beeckman
... language, that this translation is of course especially intended. To whom and in what cases are translations of poets useful? To a perfect scholar in the original tongue they are superfluous, to one wholly ignorant of it they are apt to be (unless here and there to a Keats) meaningless, flat, and puzzling. There remains the third class of those who have a certain amount of knowledge of a language, but not enough to enable them to read unassisted its more difficult books without an expenditure of time and trouble which is virtually prohibitive. It is to this ...
— The Extant Odes of Pindar • Pindar
... back to her desk and papers. The room seemed all at once impossibly stuffy, her papers and letters dry, meaningless things. In the next office, separated from her by a partition half glass, half wood, she saw the top of Slosson's bald head as he stood up to shut his old-fashioned roll-top desk. He was leaving. She looked out of ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... Augustus never sought, nor did his successors, who were in turn appointed to all his offices. For nearly three centuries after the one-man power had become absolute, Rome continued to call itself a republic, to go through forms of election and ceremonial, which grew ever more and more meaningless and trivial. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... addition to heroic psychological literature in the little work whose title we have given. For more than two years he has apparently spent a considerable time each day in committing to memory sets of meaningless syllables, and trying to trace numerically the laws according to which they were retained or forgotten. Most of his results, we are sorry to say, add nothing to our gross experience of the matter. Here, as in the case of the saints, heroism seems to ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 508, September 26, 1885 • Various
... "tilt stones from a cart" (used to describe careless writing) was printed with l as the first letter. When the chapters were reissued in America, the proofreader, warned by the presence of numerous other gross misprints, naturally corrected the meaningless "lilt" to the obvious and natural "tilt." This change at first escaped the attention of the American editor, who in the second edition insisted on restoring the original misprint and even defended his misjudgment in a note. It is worth adding that the Oxford English ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... the ground was broken, and the seed sown. It remained to achieve the enterprise, twice defeated, of the discovery of the mouth of the Mississippi, that vital condition of his triumph, without which all other successes were meaningless ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... extraordinarily impressive. This struck us the more, perhaps, because at the time we could not in the least guess its significance, though we imagined that it must be preliminary to some sacrifice or offering. It was like the fragment of a nightmare preserved by the awakened senses in all its mad, meaningless reality. ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... going to be found out. This gives it a fresh and most substantial and important aspect. At church the morning sermon was of the usual pattern; it was the same old things said in the same old way; they had heard them a thousand times and found them innocuous, next to meaningless, and easy to sleep under; but now it was different: the sermon seemed to bristle with accusations; it seemed aimed straight and specially at people who were concealing deadly sins. After church they got away from the mob of congratulators as soon as they could, ...
— The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg • Mark Twain
... have some clear reason to the contrary, avoid the use of expressions that have been used so much that they are worn out and often almost meaningless. Such expressions as the following ones are not wrong, but are often used when they ...
— Practical Grammar and Composition • Thomas Wood
... lawn, under the square windows of the sober, opulent North Country house! And the maddest part of it all was the horrible reluctance he felt to comply with his wife's wish. He seemed to himself to pause noticeably before answering her with a meaningless half-laugh: ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... intelligent cooeperation instead of a reckless competition. We stand for mutual helpfulness instead of mutual hatred. We stand for equal rights as a fact of life instead of a catch-word of politics. We stand for the rule of the people as a practical truth instead of a meaningless pretense. We stand for a representative government that represents the people. We battle for the actual rights ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... had selected was in a remote part of the building, there was little immediate chance of detection. So the laughter of the party grew louder and sillier; the talk more foolish and random; the merriment more noisy and meaningless. But still most of them mingled some sense of caution with their enjoyment, and warned Eric and Wildney more than once that they must look out, and not take too much that night for fear of being caught. But it was Wildney's birth-day, and Eric's boyish mirth, suppressed by his recent troubles, ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... horrid threat against Lois seemed so fantastic, so unreal, so meaningless, that at the moment, it did not impress me even ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... be tired expecting by this time," returned Mollie practically. "Now will you please repeat that somewhat meaningless jumble of words, Betty dear? What was it—something about somebody's son having a good ...
— The Outdoor Girls at the Hostess House • Laura Lee Hope
... cannot see the kingdom of God." Its administration to infants, to such as had committed no sin, nor knew, indeed, their right hand from their left, implied a belief in the presence, not of acquired, but of original impurity. It is based on that; and without it this rite is not only mysterious, but meaningless. Blind is the eye which does not see in this old pagan ceremony a tradition of the primeval Fall, and dull the ear which does not hear in its voice no faint echo of these words, "I was shapen in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive ...
— The Angels' Song • Thomas Guthrie
... on to the last minute. Several stools were found covered with thick coatings of recently shed blood, and a horrible smell of gore pervaded the whole palace, and, indeed, the whole town. The palace was full of fetish objects just as trumpery and meaningless as those in the humblest cottages. The king's private sitting room was, like the rest, an open court with a tree growing in it. This tree was covered with fetish objects, and thickly hung with spiders' ...
— By Sheer Pluck - A Tale of the Ashanti War • G. A. Henty
... service was long but very beautiful, with giant candles burning by the draped bier, organ music that seemed to swell and rumble in the pit of one's stomach, and light voices of singing boys that made one vibrate as if one had been turned into glass—all stirring one to a quite meaningless regret, not for the man who lay deaf and dumb and blind beneath the velvet pall, but because of vague thoughts about children who die young and have wings to hover over those they loved down here below. And, oh, the increasing ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... cried Billie desperately. He was making her head swim with his meaningless ravings. "Mr. Peters, hear me! I am not married to a man at ...
— Three Men and a Maid • P. G. Wodehouse
... or the illegible, meaningless ink scrawl upon the sheet within the boldly-addressed envelope would have aroused his suspicions at the outset. So well had Bough, that expert in human frailty, understood his subject, that the letter was a bogus letter, a ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... catchword passed from one to another is often a signal of sympathy, and many a man has been taken for a wit merely because his tinkling brain has given back the echo which was expected. In stereotyped phrases, in ready-made sentences, in the small change of meaningless words, the American language is peculiarly rich. "To cut ice," "to get next to," "straight goods," {*}—these and similar expressions, of no obvious merit in themselves, long ago lost their freshness, and are not likely to assume a dignity with age. But they save trouble, ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... feet and slid the book under the pillow. Then he seized a textbook at random, and opened it wide. His eyes fastened themselves to the print, seizing upon the meaningless words as if they would save him from a retribution that Rogue Rogan ...
— Runaway • William Morrison
... rest. God is revealer, recipient, and revelation all in one. The trinity was for Hegel the central doctrine of Christianity. Popular orthodoxy had drawn near to the assertion of three Gods. The revolt, however, in asserting the unity of God, had made of God a meaningless absolute as foundation of the universe. The orthodox, in respect to the person of Christ, had always indeed asserted in laboured way that Jesus was both God and man. Starting from their own abstract conception of God, and attributing to ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... your old agent; to me his words are meaningless. Your old man could be a hypocrite; he could exercise himself in the virtue of patience, and, as he did so, look upon a person he did not love as an object indispensable for his moral exercises; but I have not yet fallen so low. If I want to exercise myself in patience, I will buy dumb-bells ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... perfectly possible for a strong and handy man, accustomed to agricultural pursuits, to earn a living from the soil, my example has little to teach in this direction. The cry of 'Back to the Land' will be meaningless until general ownership in the land is made possible. It is the burden of rent, often a cruel and unjust rent, that has driven men from the land. Not far from me at Thornthwaite there resided a man and his wife who were among the most ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... to this hodgepodge of technicalities, was dismayed and distrustful. These men spoke a language evidently familiar to them, which he, although a professional scientist, found a meaningless jargon. The whole thing seemed unreal, had a purely theoretic or literary quality about it that made him question even their premises. In the tainted air of the council room, listening to these little pot-bellied Professoren from Amsterdam ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... our political freedom—a freedom which without economic freedom is meaningless indeed. Labor Day symbolizes our determination to achieve an economic freedom for the average man which will give his ...
— The Fireside Chats of Franklin Delano Roosevelt • Franklin Delano Roosevelt
... lines) for their newly discovered back history in the eighth century A.D., they should have fixed upon exactly this year 585 B.C. for the death of their supposed first Mikado Jimmu (i.e. Shen-wu, the "divinely martial"). The next three Kings of Wu, all of whom, like himself, bore dissyllabic and meaningless barbarian names, were sons of Shou-meng, and a fourth son was the cultured Ki-chah, who visited orthodox China several times, both as a spy and in order to improve himself. Then follow two sons of the last and first, respectively, of the ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... shouting shrill, useless words. All about him were cries, commands, entreaties, confused, meaningless. Ten feet from the plate he launched himself through space, with arms outstretched. The dust was ...
— The New Boy at Hilltop • Ralph Henry Barbour
... and meaningless stimulus time after time; at first the animal makes some instinctive exploring or defensive reaction; but with continued repetition of the stimulus, he ceases after a while to respond. The instinctive reaction has been detached from one ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... these apparently meaningless words he turned to the shaken Boyle and, taking his arm, began to walk him up and down in the ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... Gaelic, the fulness of its similes, and its general freshness incontestably prove it to be the original. I would refer especially to the sea-pieces (e.g., Carhon, ll. 48-52.) In Gaelic they are vivid and graphic—in English tame, and almost meaningless—a fact such as might naturally be expected from the words of a true mariner being translated by a thoroughly "inland bred man" like Macpherson, but absolutely irreconcilable with his having written the Gaelic. Mr Campbell himself in his admirable work of the "West Highland Tales," vol. ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 1, November 1875 • Various
... writing, messages from the dead. She sat down, in the silence of the night, to hold over the clean sheet of paper the perpendicular pencil. With her head bowed forward, her pose an epitome of patience, she fixed her eyes upon the pencil point, which slowly made meaningless curlicues. ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... the sky above him, and he remembered where he was and how he got here. But it took him a long while for this, and the past seemed to him as if it had been covered by a veil, infinitely distant, infinitely far away, infinitely meaningless. He only knew that his previous life (in the first moment when he thought about it, this past life seemed to him like a very old, previous incarnation, like an early pre-birth of his present self)—that his previous life had been abandoned by him, that, full of disgust and wretchedness, ...
— Siddhartha • Herman Hesse
... cruel sacrifice—since she should never get a penny back. He had felt himself, on their meeting, quite yearningly reach out to her—so decidedly, by the morning's end, and that of his scattered sombre stations, had he been sated with meaningless contacts, with the sense of people all about him intensely, though harmlessly, animated, yet at the same time raspingly indifferent. They would have, he and she at least, their common pang—through which fact, somehow, he should feel less stranded. It wasn't that he wanted to ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... your correspondent's method? With a large air of virtuous impartiality he adopts 1886 for his starting-point all through his tables. It may be my denseness, but beyond meaningless uniformity, I can see absolutely nothing in this method to commend it. I see, however, that it is very useful for optimistic purposes. Did it not strike the reader that, in most industries, 1886 was a year of bad trade, and that therefore its adoption as a starting year ...
— Are we Ruined by the Germans? • Harold Cox
... woman on earth loved him as she did? What if he should show her the contrary? He must no longer love, only permit himself to be loved! This advice did not displease him. In fact perhaps it was sensible to direct a wild life full of adventures which, in reality, were meaningless, monotonous, and profoundly unsatisfying, into the channels of a regulation domestic existence. But if he himself decided to bring it to a close, it should not be the end which Else ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... element that was the parent motive of sustained industry. The dull routine of the factory hand in a cotton mill has gone. The life of a pioneer settler in America two hundred years ago, penurious and dangerous as it was, stands out brightly beside the dull and meaningless ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... But it isn't quite as easy as all that, my dear fellow. In times of unrest power comes automatically more and more into the hands of the man who can talk; men like Ramage, and others of his kidney. A few meaningless but high flown phrases; a few such parrot cries as 'Down with the Capitalist and the Future is for the Worker,' and you've got even the steadiest man unsettled. . . . Especially if he's one of a crowd; ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... the prayers his David would have sobbed out, how willingly would he have consented to be blotted out from the book of fame. A Passover tune hummed in his brain, sad, sweet tears sprang to his eyes—yea, his soul found more satisfaction in a meaningless melody charged with tremulous memories of childhood, than in all ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... height of his power in Nauvoo, Smith printed in the Times and Seasons a reproduction of these hieroglyphics accompanied by this alleged translation, of what he called "the Book of Abraham," and they were also printed in the Millennial Star.* The translation was a meaningless jumble of ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... thought such things as these so very funny that he could not possibly help laughing; how silly and meaningless—yes, and cruel—did they seem to him now! Oh, Satan was struggling for Tip to-day: he was reaping the fruits of long weeks spent in evil company ...
— Tip Lewis and His Lamp • Pansy (aka Isabella Alden)
... invariably pulled a grimace, and either turned away without speaking or answered with some nonsensical French phrase—"Comme c'est tres jolie!" or the like. Or again, feigning to look serious and stolidly wise, he would say something absolutely meaningless and bearing no relation whatever to the question asked him, or else suddenly exclaim, with a look of pretended unconsciousness, the word bulku or poyechali or kapustu, [Respectively, "roll of butter," "away," and ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... from the icy curb-stone, A form half-reclining, half-clad, and unknown. Dead eyes looking up with a meaningless stare, Lay close to the crowded and broad thoroughfare; A form so emaciate the spirit had fled— But the pulpit and press and the public all said, As society's doings they sought to recall, That a "brilliant success" was the ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... amongst us, having taken off her shawl, bonnet and veil, and I was able to examine her at my leisure. She was no longer handsome. The square face, the broad heavy jaw, the coarse hair turning grey, and above all the vulgar expression of the mouth, contrasted singularly with the eternal and meaningless reverie of the dreamy gaze. Resting her elbows on the table, familiar and shapeless, she joined in the conversation without for an instant losing sight of her plate. Just over her head, proud amid all the melancholy rubbish of the drawing-room, a large portrait signed by an illustrious name, stood ...
— Artists' Wives • Alphonse Daudet
... however, that meaningless words have always been the favorite components of verbal charms, whose power, in the opinion of medieval conjurers, was in direct ratio to their obscurity;[38:3] and this fact is well shown in the incantations used ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... recreated. The prayer concerned that. "Even though I die, I will in some way keep defeat from you," she cried, and so deep was her determination that her whole body shook. Her eyes glowed and she clenched her fists. "If I am dead and see him becoming a meaningless drab figure like myself, I will come back," she declared. "I ask God now to give me that privilege. I demand it. I will pay for it. God may beat me with his fists. I will take any blow that may befall if but this my boy be allowed to express something for us ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... idle, ignorant, and squalid; the men worked as little and robbed as much as they could. The Kurds practise polygamy; their religion is simply the practice of a few formalities which repetition renders meaningless. The costume of the wealthier is absolutely Oriental, but that of the common people differs in some particulars. The men wear wide linen trousers, and over them a shirt confined round the waist by a girdle, with a sleeveless woollen ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... Beethoven's Eighth Symphony. I had noticed in the preceding rehearsal that Keissiger had fallen into the error of all the ordinary conductors of this work by taking the tempo di minuetto of the third movement at a meaningless waltz time, whereby not only does the whole piece lose its imposing character, but the trio is rendered absolutely ridiculous by the impossibility of the violoncello part being interpreted at such ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... man's words had taken hold of her. Her troubled mind could not withstand them. He had inspired her with a feeling of security she had not known for weeks. Her tears were no longer tears of despair. They were tears of thankfulness and hope. But when she spoke her words seemed utterly bald and meaningless to express the wave of ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... which the critical and inquisitive genius of the Renaissance opened for investigation. In the former of these regions we find two agencies at work—art and scholarship. During the Middle Ages the plastic arts, like philosophy, had degenerated into barren and meaningless scholasticism—a frigid reproduction of lifeless forms copied technically and without inspiration from debased patterns. Pictures became symbolically connected with the religious feelings of the people, formulas from which ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... see, Jasper," said the other good-humouredly. "There, I think that will do now, with a strip or two of plaster which I have here," producing some diachylon from a pocket-book. "How do you feel now?" he added, addressing himself to the boy, who had kept his eyes fixed on his face in the same meaningless stare as when he had ...
— Picked up at Sea - The Gold Miners of Minturne Creek • J.C. Hutcheson
... looked back upon from the gardens of the Tuileries, affords a most excellent idea of that stately style, as developed in France under Francois I. The whole of this splendid plan, however, has been rendered futile by the destruction of the Tuileries, without which the enclosure becomes wholly meaningless. ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... superiority of a conscience void of offence over written scripture or formal ceremony—the character of being in essence the broadest creed of Christendom. Injudicious retention of customs which had grown meaningless had, he felt sure, brought down upon the body that most fatal of all influences—contempt. "You see it in your own Church," he said. "There is a school which, by reviving obsolete doctrines and practices, will end in getting the ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... he would go mad. The everlasting routine, the meaningless march of hours. The work period, the sleep period ... the work period, the sleep period ... endless monotony, an existence without a purpose. Men ...
— Empire • Clifford Donald Simak
... so important a part of Christian thought that the resurrection naturally lost its vital significance, and it has practically held no place in the great systems of philosophy elaborated by the Christian thinkers in modern times." And, yet, the Church continues to repeat the now meaningless words, "I believe in the Resurrection of the Body." And while practically no one now believes it, still the recital of the words, and the statement of one's belief in them, forms a necessary requisite for admission into the Christian Church to-day. Such is the persistent hold of dead ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... is this who considers that His widest work is to be done by Him after He is dead? 'Them also I must bring.' Thou? how? when? Surely such words as these, side by side with a clear prevision of the death that was so soon to come, are either meaningless or the utterance of an arrogance bordering on insanity, or they anticipate what an Evangelist declares did take place—that the Lord was 'taken up into heaven and sat at the right hand of God,' whilst ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... His knighthood was quite a recent distinction, and nobody knew exactly how he had managed to get it. He had originally been known in Fleet Street by the irreverent sobriquet of "greasy Chetwynd," owing to his largeness, oiliness and general air of blandly-meaningless benevolence. He had a wife and two daughters, and one of his objects in wintering at Cairo was to get his cherished children married. It was time, for the bloom was slightly off the fair girl-roses,—the dainty ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... of the dark I return— The abode of the shades; The words which they said Were the strengthless words of the Dead, Meaningless, ...
— A Legend of Old Persia and Other Poems • A. B. S. Tennyson
... and also Ling Roth [7, p. 88]. We figure (Figs. 75, 76, 77) three designs for the throat known sometimes as KATAK, frogs, sometimes as TALI GASIENG, thread of the spinning wheel, and no doubt other meaningless names are applied to them. Two of the figures (Figs. 75, 77) are evidently modifications of the Bakatan GEROWIT design, but here they are represented with the tatu pigment, whilst with the Bakatans the design is in the natural colour of the skin against a background of pigment, I.E. the ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... rock on the hillside, I made my way to that, to try what virtue there might be in a shadow not produced by foliage. Seated under the brow of the boulder, I again applied myself to the dim-looking text, but it had become utterly meaningless; and a musical cricket under the rock would have put me to sleep if I had permitted myself to remain. I found that neither tree nor rock would lend me help; but down in the meadow I saw the brook sparkling, and spanning it, a little bridge where I had ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... our Lord, no heresy, no schism has ever pretended to the reality of a catholic existence, and, if the word is self-applied by certain sects, the world laughs at it as a meaningless thing. The Catholic Church alone has truly claimed and ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... talking of it, but Hugh Alston never remembered what it was about. He was thinking of a girl with cold disdainful looks that changed suddenly to softness and tenderness. She sat beside him as she had sat opposite to him at dinner. On the stage the actors talked meaningless stuff; nothing was real, save this ...
— The Imaginary Marriage • Henry St. John Cooper
... to us, poured over us, swept away the dross of selfishness and deception and petty scheming, and Patriotism rose from the swelling wave stately as a goddess. Patriotism, that had been to us but a dingy and meaningless antiquity, took on a new form, a new mien, a countenance divinely fair and forever young, and received once more the homage of our hearts. Was that a childish outburst of excitement, or the glow of an aroused principle? Was it a ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... loosed that he could scarcely walk alone,—set the painter struggling for words that would mean nothing—the only words that, under the circumstances, could serve. Aaron King was somewhat out of practise in the use of meaningless words, and the art of talking without saying anything is an art that requires constant exercise if one would not commit serious technical blunders. James Rutlidge's greeting was insolently familiar; as a man of certain mind ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... movement and a buzz of excited voices—meaningless, chaotic. Zahara could feel the draught from the newly opened door. A thin stream of blood was stealing across the carpet. It had almost reached the fallen rose petals, which it strangely resembled in colour under ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... appear here; meaningless to the group of men and to the Two Diamond manager; yet to Leviatt they were burdened with a dire significance. They told him that the stray-man was aware of his duplicity; they meant perhaps that the stray-man ...
— The Two-Gun Man • Charles Alden Seltzer
... human being born blind, dumb, deaf, and without feeling would still, I suppose, be a human being, because it would be conscious of existence; it would breathe and know that its heart was beating, but without sight or sensation there could be no idea of space—time, to it, would be a meaningless series of breaths or heartbeats. Without touch or sight it could have no idea of form or size, which are merely conditions of space, and both the past and the future would be absolutely non-existent ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... through a stretch of torment. It was strange that she should have chosen to come back and test the full effect of this shapeless, barren ugliness upon herself. Why had she wanted to submit herself to it, did she still want to submit herself to it, the insufferable torture of these ugly, meaningless people, this defaced countryside? She felt like a beetle toiling in the dust. ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... and purpose in all the meaningless mystery and misery? Is "heaven but the vision of fulfilled desire, hell the shadow of a soul on fire?" And are we both? Are we improving? Look on life within its gates. Are we retrograding? Strip the curtains from the hearts of men and women. And marriage, the great pivot ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... himself perceived—as he looked at her he could not but perceive—that a certain amount of social energy seemed to enliven Lady Dumbello when he approached her. She was given to smile when addressed, but her usual smile was meaningless, almost leaden, and never in any degree flattering to the person to whom it was accorded. Very many women smile as they answer the words which are spoken to them, and most who do so flatter by their smile. The thing is so common that no one thinks of it. The flattering ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... discussions, or subtle analysis of mind. It comes there as a matter of direct perception, and the conviction with which the truth has been grasped cannot fail to impress the readers. That out of the apparently meaningless speculations of the Brahma@nas this doctrine could have developed, might indeed appear to be too improbable ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... wanted to meet you," he resumed, sternly, after a pause, "to hold you accountable for all the idiocy and cruelty of this muddled and meaningless world of yours. You make a hundred seeds and only one bears fruit. You make a million worlds and only one seems inhabited. What do you mean by it, eh? What do you ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... agreement as to what portion of the papers should be published, although both Governments have long since promised publication. The words used in the House of Commons by Sir Edward Grey were altered by the French Government into meaningless words, and the words actually used excluded by Governmental action ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... in the telling of it, but meaningless phrases and abrupt expressions may, at certain moments in ...
— Princess Zara • Ross Beeckman
... My letters have practically been diaries. And that's more than could be said of yours.—Well, Amadeus...? Without frankness the whole situation becomes meaningless, I should say. ...
— The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie - Three Plays • Arthur Schnitzler
... opaque or transparent pigment, and he could make his few and simple colors say anything he chose. In his mature work there is a profound knowledge of the means to be employed and a great economy in their use, and there is no approach to indiscriminate or meaningless loading. "Things are where they are for a purpose," and if the surface of a picture is rough in any place it is because just that degree of roughness was necessary to attain the desired effect. He ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... is not possible to give forms for letters of this character. They are meaningless unless they come from the heart, and should be characterized by sincerity. Nevertheless, they should be written, and promptly, as also letters of acknowledgment of gifts, favors offered, and the "bread-and-butter letter"—the missive you write ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... drama. There Sappho's rival is Thalassa, Phaon's slave-mate, who conceives as love's only culmination the bearing of children. Sappho, in her superiority, points out that mere perpetuation of physical life is a meaningless circle, unless it leads to some higher satisfaction. But in the end the figure of "the eternal mother," as typified by Thalassa, is more powerful than is Sappho, in the struggle for Phaon's love. Thus Aphrodite ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... was searing Lorenzi's soul, as he stood at the table with his arm still raised? Casanova, the only one of the company who had remained seated, derived an involuntary artistic pleasure from the contemplation of this fine, threatening gesture, meaningless now, but seemingly petrified, as if the young man had been transformed ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler |
