"Nullity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... good for priests, nobles, and old fashioned countesses: it is good for nothing for the present generation. The revolution has taught the people to know their rank in the state. They will never consent to fall back into their former nullity, and to be tied up by the nobility and the clergy. The army can never belong to the Bourbons. Our victories and our misfortunes have established an indissoluble tie between the army and myself. It is only through me that the soldiers can earn vengeance, power, and ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. I • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... protests is to make it retroactive, and to violate this very law itself. Every day you have to reverse a decision because of some formal error. But there is not a single one of your laws that is not tainted with nullity, and the most monstrous nullity of all, the very hypothesis of the law. Soufflard, Lacenaire, all the scoundrels whom you send to the scaffold turn in their graves and accuse you of judicial forgery. What answer can you ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff
... come into direct hostility and conflict with the violence which resists the execution of Law; and government must crush that violence, or that violence must crush the government. A government is at an end, a nullity, when it cannot execute its laws. Let it be carefully remembered also, that violent resistance to Law cannot be justified, when there is no righteous design to overthrow the government itself; for no man owes a half-allegiance ...
— The Religious Duty of Obedience to Law • Ichabod S. Spencer
... surface this time; he had gone deep down to the springs of human nature. He had not merely analysed the woman till her character lay in ruins around him, but he had built her up again out of the psychic atoms, and Laura was alive. She showed the hand of the master by her own nullity. In her splendid vanity she was like some piece of elaborate golden fretwork, from which the substance had been refined by excess ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... language of the instrument, and the objects it was intended to accomplish; and as this league of States would, upon the adoption of the new Government, cease to have any power over the territory, and the ordinance they had agreed upon be incapable of execution, and a mere nullity, it was obvious that some provision was necessary to give the new Government sufficient power to enable it to carry into effect the objects for which it was ceded, and the compacts and agreements which the States had made with each other in the exercise of their powers of sovereignty. ...
— Report of the Decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, and the Opinions of the Judges Thereof, in the Case of Dred Scott versus John F.A. Sandford • Benjamin C. Howard
... centuries, the political nullity of the German nation, the absence of any strong popular element to make head against the petty despotism of the princes, and launch Germany in the career of progress. Hence the backwardness and torpor of the Teutonic race in its original seat, while elsewhere it led the world. Hence, while England ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... will confide in me,—that is, if you will let me represent your interests with the Cardinals and the Holy Father,—I heartily offer you my services as mediator and advocate with regard to the question of nullity. At an early age I studied theology and ecclesiastical law. Your marriage may be considered null and void, according to this or that point of view. You know that upon the death of the Princesse de Nemours, Mademoiselle de Nemours and Mademoiselle d'Aumale, ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... 24 hours and live these 24 hours double. There is no art but good art and what is not best is not art at all. I hate pretense. It only exists among people who know nothing. I know nothing in any line but I would rather remain a nullity studying with serious intentions than profit of or repose upon some meaningless accidental achievement. Of all traits presumption is the most insufferable. Oh, how one is anxious to put one's finger in pies one is ...
— Nelka - Mrs. Helen de Smirnoff Moukhanoff, 1878-1963, a Biographical Sketch • Michael Moukhanoff
... failed to overwhelm this compact and thoroughly alive minority, but have been formed and moulded into shape by it. In protesting against New England, the Vallandighams and Coxes are only proving the nullity of 'expunging resolutions.' 'Can they make that not to be which has been?' Until they can recall the past, annihilate the past inhabitants of these States, and from stones raise up some other progenitors for the present generation, they ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... preferred to attack the strength rather than the weaknesses of mankind, and in all his schemes he counted inconsistency among the passions, and panic among the virtues. He still hoped that Orange might be tempted by the prospect of immediate happiness to press for the nullity of the Parflete marriage. Parflete himself was indulging in the most extravagant demonstrations of remorse. He behaved, as Disraeli said, more like a cunning woman than an able man, and he was an agent of the kind most dangerous to his employers—irregularly scrupulous, ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... of all to be recognized is the danger of idealism. It is the one besetting sin of the human race. It means the fall into automatism, mechanism, and nullity. ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... less sacred in that Catholic country, than among those nations where the laws and religion admit of its being dissolved. Because they could not break the contract, they feigned that it had not existed; and the ground of nullity, immodestly alleged by the married pair, was admitted with equal facility by priests and magistrates, alike corrupt. These divorces, veiled under another name, became so frequent, that the most important ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... new God! But still continuing, and as if persisting by right, as an ultimatum and maximum of the God-shaping force, of the creator spiritus in man, this pitiable God of Christian monotono-theism! This hybrid image of ruin, derived from nullity, concept and contradiction in which all decadence instincts, all cowardices and lassitudes of soul have ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 4, June 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... saying that the several particulars he has enumerated did not exist in America, and neglecting to point out the particular period in which the means they did not exist, reduces thereby his declaration to a nullity, by taking away ...
— A Letter Addressed to the Abbe Raynal, on the Affairs of North America, in Which the Mistakes in the Abbe's Account of the Revolution of America Are Corrected and Cleared Up • Thomas Paine
... or voyages, as well as for the contraventions of their captains and officers against the present treaty, and against the ordinances and edicts which shall be published in consequence of and conformity to it, under pain of forfeiture and nullity of ...
— The Medallic History of the United States of America 1776-1876 • J. F. Loubat
... passed in this black nullity—he never could compute it—moments, doubtless, but it seemed hours, tried to the utmost the nerve of the entrapped trader, albeit inured by twenty years' experience to the capricious temper of the Cherokee Indians. ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... 361 [See "The Nullity of the Pretended Assembly at Saint Andrews and Dundee," &c., p. 312. Printed in the year 1652. As many had been under age when the Solemn League and Covenant was first sworn the Commission of the General Assembly ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... the Hurons, and soon to be incorporated with them. The travellers visited seven of their towns, and then passed westward to those of the people whom Champlain calls the Cheveax Releves, and whom he commends for neatness and ingenuity no less than he condemns them for the nullity of their summer attire. As the strangers passed from town to town, their arrival was everywhere the signal of festivity. Champlain exchanged pledges of amity with his hosts, and urged them to come down with the Hurons to the yearly ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... the other supplies the energy and the principles which already once, between the Seven Years' War and the assembly of the States General, saved human progress in face of the political fatuity of England and the political nullity of France; and they are now, amid the distraction of the various representatives of an obsolete ordering, the only forces to be trusted at once for multiplying the achievements of human intelligence stimulated by human sympathy, and for diffusing ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... moved by such scruples. They exercised a twofold jurisdiction,—as a diocesan and as a metropolitan tribunal,—and both affirmed the nullity of the marriage. The metropolitan tribunal, while admitting the first two grounds,—namely, the absence of witnesses and of the proper priest,—based its decision principally on the non-consent of the Emperor. The diocesan tribunal had declared that to atone for the infringement of the laws of the ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... again, had he not logically met and demonstrated, to his own satisfaction, the nullity of the religious dogmas on which New England faith was based? There could be no such inner life, he said to himself,—he had demonstrated it as an absurdity. What was it, then,—this charm, so subtile and so strong, by which this fair child, his inferior in age, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... mere appearance is scarcely a presumption in favor of a conclusion in accordance with it. Science and experience are full of examples exposing the nullity or the falsity of appearances. The sun seems to move around the earth; but truth contradicts it. We seem to discern distances and the forms of bodies by direct sight; but the truth is we see nothing but shades ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... certainly intended to produce some limitation to legislative discretion, and it must be construed so as to produce such an effect, if it is possible. To give it such a construction as will bring it to a mere nullity would violate the strongest injunctions of common-sense and decorum, and yet that appears to me to be the effect of the construction adopted by the committee. The effect of the amendment, say the committee, ...
— American Eloquence, Volume I. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... have seen it since. A young man was leaning against the mantel-piece. Marguerite, seated at the piano, let her fingers wander over the notes, beginning scraps of music without finishing them. The whole scene breathed boredom, the man embarrassed by the consciousness of his nullity, the woman tired of her dismal visitor. At the voice of Prudence, Marguerite rose, and coming toward us with a look of gratitude ...
— Camille (La Dame aux Camilias) • Alexandre Dumas, fils
... allowance of two shillings a week. She was very angry. Yet her anger was of that dangerous, half-ironical sort which wears away its subject and has no outward effect. A feeling of half-bitter mockery kept her going. In the ponderous, rather sordid nullity of Manchester House she became shadowy and absorbed, absorbed in nothing in particular, yet absorbed. She was always more or less busy: and certainly there was always something to be done, whether ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... must necessarily follow, either that justice is not the same thing in America as in Britain, or else that the British Parliament pay less regard to it here than there. But, that we do not point out to his Majesty the injustice of these acts, with intent to rest on that principle the cause of their nullity; but to show that experience confirms the propriety of those political principles, which exempt us from the jurisdiction of the British Parliament. The true ground on which we declare these acts void, is, that the British Parliament has no right to exercise ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... mean by this that I have a weak character,—although struggle for existence might have made it stronger; but still I maintain that the less stony the road, the less chance of a fall. It is not owing to constitutional laziness, either, that I am a nullity. I possess alike a great facility for acquiring knowledge, and a desire for it; I read much, and have a good memory. Perhaps I could not summon energy enough for a long, slow work, but the greater facility ought to serve ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... figure in that tragic conflict, the vision of the Emperor suddenly rose distinctly before his inner eyes, deprived of his imperial authority, which he had committed to the hands of the Empress-regent, stripped of his military command, which he had conferred on Marshal Bazaine; a nullity, the vague and unsubstantial shadow of an emperor, a nameless, cumbersome nonentity whom no one knew what to do with, whom Paris rejected and who had ceased to have a position in the army, for he had pledged himself to issue ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... it, he would scan it, and request to get keeping it. In no shop was he refused, so that by the time he got to the end of the village, he was carrying two dozen large concert placards, while the tout, merrily whistling, and all unconscious of the nullity of his labours, was on his way back to Aberdeen. "Lead us not into temptation," said the minister, as he thrust the garish announcements into his study stove. None of Mr. Pollock's flock were at the concert that night. Perhaps, if any had gone, little harm would have been done. ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... make action, or at least human action, a dispensable accident in the universe, an ineffective and unsubstantial unreality, while at the same time those who put it thus, profess to see through the illusion and to enjoy moments of insight which recognize its nullity. This way of putting it in my judgement intolerably ...
— Progress and History • Various
... allotted. Nor will the wife be entitled to alimony where she has sufficient means of support independent of her husband. Permanent alimony is that which is allotted to the wife after final decree. By the Matrimonial Causes Act 1907, the court may, if it think fit, on any decree for dissolution or nullity of marriage, order that the husband shall, to the satisfaction of the court, secure to the wife such a gross sum of money or such annual sum of money for any term not exceeding her life, as having regard to her fortune (if any), to the ability of her ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... England. Its unseemly details are left in the obscurity of private life elsewhere, and not brought forward for public consideration as in England. One arrives in London just in time to hear the Lord Chief Justice make a grand summing-up of a nullity suit, and to hear two other judges court the public eye with detailed remarks in levity of moral conduct and the immodesty of women. We sometimes in England refer to the poisonous daily Press of Paris, ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... result of Tyrrel's cruelty. As she was the victim of tyranny, Falkland felt it his duty at a public assembly to denounce Tyrrel as her murderer. The squire retaliated by making a personal assault on his antagonist. As Falkland "had perceived the nullity of all expostulation with Mr. Tyrrel," and as duelling according to the Godwinian principles was "the vilest of all egotism," he was deprived of the natural satisfaction of meeting his assailant in physical or even mental combat. Yet "he was too deeply pervaded with the idle and ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... the purchase is complete, the full price paid and delivery of possession made. But in some cases this was a mere conventional statement, and both payment and delivery were delayed. There was to be no return of the goods, no turning back from the bargain; the pleading of a suit of nullity of sale is expressly barred. It is of interest to notice who were regarded as competent, or likely to take action to recover the property. Sons, grandsons, brothers, brothers' sons, are all named. The enumeration ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts and Letters • C. H. W. Johns
... of evil crept over him and he opened the letter and read it. Then his life fell to wreck in a moment. Its nullity, its hopelessness, its futility, its folly, the world with its elusive joys, love with its deceptions so cruel and so sweet-all, all came sweeping up on him like the sea-wrack out of a storm. In an instant the truth appeared to ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... sovereign State in the Union. The Union itself, apart from the sovereign States that compose it, is a mere abstraction, a nullity, and binds nobody. All its substance and vitality are in the agreement by which the States constitute themselves a firm or copartnership, for certain specific purposes, and for which they open an office and establish an agency under express instructions for the management of the general affairs ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson
... was that which Pitt recommended. He held that the British Parliament was not constitutionally competent to pass a law for taxing the colonies. He therefore considered the Stamp Act as a nullity, as a document of no more validity than Charles's writ of ship-money, or James's proclamation dispensing with the penal laws. This doctrine seems to us, we must ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... both countries; the two greatest civilized nations of the world, placed at a distance of scarcely twenty miles from each other, had contrived, by their artificial regulations, to reduce their commerce with each other to a mere nullity." Every member speaking on this occasion agreed in the general sentiments favorable to unrestricted intercourse, which had thus been advanced; one of them remarking, at the conclusion of the debate, that "the principles of free trade, which he was happy to ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... N. inexistence^; nonexistence, nonsubsistence; nonentity, nil; negativeness &c adj.; nullity; nihility^, nihilism; tabula rasa [Lat.], blank; abeyance; absence &c 187; no such thing &c 4; nonbeing, nothingness, oblivion. annihilation; extinction &c (destruction) 162; extinguishment, extirpation, Nirvana, obliteration. V. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... head of the wolf: combativeness enormously developed, alimentiveness large, while conscientiousness is entirely wanting. On the other hand, look at this cranium. Here combativeness is a nullity—absolutely wanting—while the fullness of the sentimental organs indicate at once the mild and ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... Carteret, had been so frequently at the fort in New York, he should come once to his house, where he might be assured he would be welcome. Hereupon the governor returned again to New York with his object unaccomplished, and shortly afterwards, by proclamation, declared the nullity of the government of Carteret; that at the most he was only the head of a colony, namely, New Jersey; and that he was guilty of misusing the king's name, power, and authority. He sent boats several times to Achter ...
— Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679-1680 • Jasper Danckaerts
... spirits with anger or sadness by such shadows, and entangle ourselves into fantastical passions which alter both our mind and body?... Enquire of yourself, where is the object of this alteration? Is there anything but us in nature, except subsisting nullity? over whom it hath any power?... Aristodemus, king of the Messenians, killed himself upon a conceit he took of some ill presage by I know not what howling of dogs.... It is the right way to prize one's life at the right worth of it, to forego ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... in any link of the chain. I had traced the secret to its ultimate result,—and that result was the nail. It had, I say, in every respect, the appearance of its fellow in the other window; but this fact was an absolute nullity (conclusive us it might seem to be) when compared with the consideration that here, at this point, terminated the clew. 'There must be something wrong,' I said, 'about the nail.' I touched it; and the head, with about a quarter of ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... or immaterial, made fraudulently or innocently, avoids a note in the hands of one who made the alteration. But in a later Missouri case, it is held, that the addition of the signature of a married woman without a separate estate to a note already issued was a nullity and without legal effect and therefore to be considered as no alteration and not to discharge the ...
— Disputed Handwriting • Jerome B. Lavay
... Washington. When we remember that a Roman Catholic, and a member of the Order of Jesuits, is a member of Pierce's Cabinet, the Postmaster-General—and when we remember that Democracy now, without the Catholic-Foreign vote, is almost a nullity in the United States, we have a clear solution of this preference given the Spanish priest, PADRE VIJIL, over the American citizen, but a few weeks afterwards! As a sign of the times, the fact is one worthy of note. It shows, at least, that when Protestantism cannot prevail with the Administration ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow
... with him in a new Baptism, that he was out of the way himself, and had mis-led them, for he did not finde that there was any upon earth that could administer Baptism, and therefore their last Baptism was a nullity, as well as their first; and therefore they must lay down all, and wait for the coming of new Apostles: and so they dissolved themselves, and turned Seekers, keeping that one Principle, That every ...
— Great Epochs in American History, Vol. II - The Planting Of The First Colonies: 1562—1733 • Various
... criticism, and petulant wit; we find a pervading ironical bitterness, rising at times to fierce invective, and even to the frenzy of passion when his mother is the theme, relapsing again to trance-like meditations on the depravity of the world, the littleness of man and the nullity of appearance; and when his mind does revert to this "great action," this "dread command," which is supposed to haunt it, and to keep it in a whirl of doubt and irresolution, it is because it is forcibly recalled to it, because some incident startles him to recollection, ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... decrees. You have said, 'The Congress shall have power to lay excises.' They say, 'The Congress shall not have this power;' or, what is equivalent, they shall not exercise it, for a power that may not be exercised is a nullity. Your representatives have said, and four times repeated it, 'An excise on distilled spirits shall be collected;' they say, 'It shall not be collected. We will punish, expel, and banish the officers who ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... of Jefferson's nobility that one of his first efforts was to undo, so far as he could, the mischief effected by the detested Sedition law. Every man who was in durance because of its operation was pardoned, and he looked upon the law as "a nullity as obsolete and palpable, as if congress had ordered us to fall down ...
— Thomas Jefferson • Edward S. Ellis et. al.
... made, in the very words of this petition, it would be void." [Footnote: Quincy's Reports, p. 474.] While so sound a man, otherwise, as John Adams wrote, in 1776, to Mr. Justice Cushing: "You have my hearty concurrence in telling the jury the nullity of acts of Parliament.... I am determined to die of that opinion, let the jus gladii say what it will." [Footnote: Works of J. ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... contest between the ins and outs. The question was, whether the withering influence of the overseers, the domination of the churchwardens, and the blighting despotism of the vestry-clerk, should be allowed to render the election of beadle a form—a nullity: whether they should impose a vestry-elected beadle on the parish, to do their bidding and forward their views, or whether the parishioners, fearlessly asserting their undoubted rights, should elect an independent ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... of their feeling for Furst and Company, Berlin Society was farther obliged to pronounce the claim of Miller Arnold a nullity, and that no injustice whatever had been done him. Mere pretences on his part, subterfuges for his idle conduct, for his inability to pay due rent, said Berlin Society. And that impartial Soldier-person, whom Friedrich sent to examine ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... perceive how needs (besoins), at the outset reduced to nullity, and of which the number gradually increases, have produced the inclination (penchant) to actions fitted to satisfy it; how the actions, becoming habitual and energetic, have caused the development of the organs which execute them; how the force which excites the organic movements ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... the days of the Revolution, voted God from his throne. They abolished the Sabbath, and declared that Christianity was a nullity. They set apart one day in ten, not for religion, but for idleness and licentiousness. History informs us that the goddess of Reason, personified by a naked prostitute, was drawn in triumph through the streets of Paris, and that the municipal officers of the city, and ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... the five-guinea Tractors, although they proved that they could work the same miracles with pieces of wood and tobacco-pipe. It takes time for truth to operate as well as Homoeopathic globules. Many persons thought the results of these trials were decisive enough of the nullity of the treatment; those who wish to see the kind of special pleading and evasion by which it is attempted to cover results which, stated by the "Homoeopathic Examiner" itself, look exceedingly like a miserable failure, may consult the opening flourish of that Journal. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... bought the box, to begin with, and he understood winding it up, and knew which tune it was going to play beforehand; altogether the possession of this unique "piece of music" was a proof that Mr. Pullet's character was not of that entire nullity which might otherwise have been attributed to it. But uncle Pullet, when entreated to exhibit his accomplishment, never depreciated it by a too-ready consent. "We'll see about it," was the answer ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... in his glances and the movements of his head, as he looked round him with curiosity, was turned into comedy by a hat which ruled that mankind should have well-cropped hair and a staid demeanor, such, for example, as Mr. Arrowsmith's, whose nullity of face and perfect tailoring might pass everywhere without ridicule? One feels why it is often better for greatness to be dead, and to have got rid of ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... the honey of probability in it, and be the more eager because their enjoyment would end with sunset. Our impulses, our spiritual activities, no more adjust themselves to the idea of their future nullity, than the beating of our heart, or the irritability ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... him, for passing him over in silence avoids the will; and this rule is so strict, that even if the son die in the lifetime of the father no heir can take under the will, because of its original nullity. As regards daughters and other descendants of either sex by the male line, the ancients did not observe this rule in all its strictness; for if these persons were neither instituted nor disinherited, ...
— The Institutes of Justinian • Caesar Flavius Justinian
... had directed, but not made by the State, it would be equally invalid. Indeed, the Legislature may itself have given a direction in contravention of the State constitution, and thus the direction prove a nullity. So, too, the Legislature may have acted in contravention of the Federal Constitution, and for that reason its direction may have been void. The appointing power is the State, the manner of its action is prescribed by the Legislature; ...
— The Electoral Votes of 1876 - Who Should Count Them, What Should Be Counted, and the Remedy for a Wrong Count • David Dudley Field
... great enemy of man? This brings out the idea that whilst God is possessed of infinite power, in the exercise of that power He has respect to the constitution of man in the production of virtue. He does not override the constitution, and treat it as if it were a nullity. To do so would be absurd, for forced virtue is not virtue at all. God is all-powerful, but He is ...
— The Doctrines of Predestination, Reprobation, and Election • Robert Wallace
... Since then all soothing arguments are fruitless; 'Tis fit t' apprize you that you yet remain Under my wardship by your father's will; And now to wed would be by law a nullity. ...
— The Female Gamester • Gorges Edmond Howard
... after the abdication of Napoleon, was merely a superfetation. The departure of those peers, who formed part of the army, completed its reduction to an absolute nullity. Without patriotism, without energy, it confined itself to sanctioning with an ill grace the measures adopted by the representatives. M. Thibaudeau, M. de Segur, M. de Bassano, and a few others, alone raised themselves to a level with the state of affairs. ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. II • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... character lay fully open before her now, after two years of married life. She knew precisely how narrow his mind was, how empty his thoughts, and how cold his heart. She had long since found out that the brilliant man of the world, whom everybody considered so clever, was in reality an absolute nullity, incapable of any thought that was not suggested to him by others, and at the same time full of overweening ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... king; "for instance, an accusation of the carrying off of subjects of a friendly Power out of the territory of that Power; a suit for nullity of a marriage, and a cross-suit for the declaration of the validity of the said marriage—and the holy saints know what besides. Well, one thing at a time. Let us try this ...
— Fair Margaret • H. Rider Haggard
... would be better than nullity," I said. "I will tell you what to do. Write me a letter to show to the head of the Foreign Office. You can state that you have known me intimately for a long time, and that I am deserving of patronage. Hint, for instance, ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... that the Convention, by suffering the clubs still to exist, after reducing them to nullity, may hope to preserve the institution as a future resource against the people, while it represses their immediate efforts against itself. The Brissotins would have attempted a similar policy, but they had nothing to oppose to the ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... the history of the Church marriages have not been annulled on equally uncertain grounds, but in this case the civil law would require proof—something to justify nullity. Failing that there would have to be collusion either on one side or both, and that is not possible—not to you, my child, not to the daughter of your mother, that dear saint who suffered so long and ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... weaknesses, all this egotism, all these vices. Mirabeau was venal, Barnave jealous, Robespierre fanatic, the Jacobin Club blood-thirsty, the National Guard selfish, La Fayette a waverer, the government a nullity. No one desired the Revolution but for his own purpose, and according to his own scheme; and it must have been wrecked on these shoals a hundred times, if there were not in human crises something even stronger ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... Marriage-bill has not only lasted till now-in the committee, but has produced, or at least disclosed, extreme heats. Mr. Fox and Mr. Pelham have had very high words on every clause, and the former has renewed his attacks on the Chancellor under the name of Dr. Gally. Yesterday on the nullity clause they sat till half an hour after three in the morning, having just then had a division On adjournment, which was rejected by the ministry by above 80 to 70. The Speaker, who had spoken well against ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... given. Thus the time of the deputies was consumed in accomplishing infinite nothing, until the moment arrived when the monarch, without any violent stroke of state, could feel safe in issuing decrees and pragmatic edicts; thus reducing the ancient legislative and consultative bodies to nullity, and substituting the will of an individual for a constitutional fabric. To criticise the expenses of government or to attempt interference with the increase of taxation became a sorry farce. The forms remained in certain provinces after the life had ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... common occasion for ecstasy. These formulations of the death idea may occur as tentative solutions of the patient's problems leading to temporary manic episodes while the psychosis is incubating. It seems that stupor as such appears only when death and nullity are accepted. ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... ever resisted a people who fight for their liberty and who defend their sacred rights. Your heroic endeavours have already reduced our unjust aggressors almost to complete nullity. Without infantry to cover their parapets, without artillery to fire their pieces, without money, without credit, and without support, they already make their last useless efforts. On our side, on the contrary, all is in abundance (sobra), ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... shared in some measure the beauty so profusely showered upon the family, was one of those feeble men who enjoy their own nullity, and grow on to old age inapt alike for good and evil, unless some nature of a stronger stamp lays hold on them and drags them like faint and pallid satellites in its wake. This was what befell the chevalier in respect of his brother: ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE GANGES—1657 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... conversations. You need concord, union, and peace. Why then do you retain among you men who excite rivalries and jealousies; why permit great and violent controversy and ambitious pretensions? How do your own words and acts agree? If your Masonry is a nullity, how can you ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... chosen by the conservative senate, and of preventing the legislative senate from debating for themselves on the measures destined to pass into law, appear to have been devised for the purpose of reducing to a mere nullity the forms of a representative government.[32] However, the consuls announced their manufacture to the people in these terms:—"Citizens, the Constitution is grounded on the true principles of a representative government, on the ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... young man, with a bilious skin, tall enough to justify his sonorous nullity (for it is rare that a tall man does not have eminent faculties of some kind) outdid the puritanism of the votaries of the extreme Left, all of them so sensitive, after the manner of prudes who have their intrigues to hide. Dressed invariably ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... Champlain read Pont-Grave's commission and his own in the presence of all the people, and he added some words, by which it was easily understood that the king's authority had to be superior to Guillaume de Caen's commissions. Pont-Grave replied at once: "I see that you believe in the nullity of my commission!" "Yes," replied Champlain, "when it comes in conflict with the king's and the viceroy's authority." This petty dispute had no serious consequence, as it was evident that Pont-Grave, being only the first ...
— The Makers of Canada: Champlain • N. E. Dionne
... you. But I must say, modern books are very consolatory and congenial to my feelings. There is, as it were, a delightful north-east wind, an intellectual blight breathing through them; a delicious misanthropy and discontent, that demonstrates the nullity of virtue and energy, and puts me in good humour with myself ...
— Nightmare Abbey • Thomas Love Peacock
... of the constitution, as well as that concerning slavery, to the people. But, acting in an official character, neither myself nor any human authority had the power to rejudge the proceedings of the convention and declare the constitution which it had framed to be a nullity. To have done this would have been a violation of the Kansas and Nebraska act, which left the people of the Territory "perfectly free to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way, subject only to the Constitution of the United States." It would equally have violated the ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 4 (of 4) of Volume 5: James Buchanan • James D. Richardson
... have her mild as a sheep.' (Eustacie set her teeth.) 'Every one will be in the same story, that her marriage was a nullity; she cannot choose but believe, and can only be thankful that we overlook the escapade and ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... them, and that among them I was to be distinguished merely as one of those who have no aptitude for writing. And so, utterly despondent, I renounced literature for ever, despite the encouragements that had been given me by Bloch. This intimate, spontaneous feeling, this sense of the nullity of my intellect, prevailed against all the flattering speeches that might be lavished upon me, as a wicked man, when everyone is loud in the praise of his good deeds, is gnawed by the secret remorse ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... been a struggle at first when the oath of the succession had been tendered to them, and Prior Houghton, with the Procurator, Humphrey Middlemore, had been committed to the Tower. The oath affirmed the nullity of Queen Katharine's marriage with the King on the alleged ground of her consummated marriage with Henry's elder brother, and involved, though the Carthusians did not clearly understand it so at the time, a rejection of the Pope's authority as connected with the dispensation for Katharine's ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... by the JUDGE and MRS. BANKET. MRS. WESTERN is a handsome woman of forty-five, with a rather stern, cold face; the JUDGE, a somewhat corpulent, genial man of fifty-five; and his wife, an amiable nullity, seven or eight years younger. They are all in evening-dress, the ladies ...
— Five Little Plays • Alfred Sutro
... the haughty claims of the pontiff, he resolved not to found the application on any general doubts concerning the papal power to permit marriage in the nearer degrees of consanguinity; but only to insist on particular grounds of nullity in the bull which Julius had granted for the marriage of Henry and Catharine. It was a maxim in the court of Rome, that if the pope be surprised into any concession, or grant any indulgence upon false suggestions, the bull may afterwards be annulled; ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... about us, struggle as we may. The only escape from faith is mental nullity. What we enjoy most in a Huxley or a Clifford is not the professor with his learning, but the human personality ready to go in for what it feels to be right, in spite of all appearances. The concrete man has but one interest,—to be right. That for him is the art of all arts, and all means are ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... things have to be done legally, of course. I believe the proper method is a nullity suit, declaring our marriage null and—er—void. It would, so to speak, ...
— Second Plays • A. A. Milne
... revived solely by Cimabue, after he had received some training from Greek artists invited by the Florentine government to paint the chapel of the Gondi in the church of S. Maria Novella; for native Italian art was not then a nullity, and this church was only begun when Cimabue was already forty years old; Even Lanzi's qualifying statement that Greek artists, although they did not paint the chapel of the Gondi, did execute rude decorations in a chapel below the existing ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... political nullity, Italy was not in a state of decline. Its worst days had ended before the middle of the eighteenth century. The fifty years preceding the French Revolution, if they had brought nothing of the spirit of liberty, ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... and an echo in the chambers of the brain. Not an hour, not a mood, not a glance of the eye, can we revoke; it is all gone, past conjuring. And yet conceive us robbed of it, conceive that little thread of memory that we trail behind us broken at the pocket's edge; and in what naked nullity should we be left! for we only guide ourselves, and only know ourselves, by these air-painted pictures ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... admirable which we before condemned—that damnable which we had previously so much admired. It follows from all this that the ultimate, aggregate, or absolute effect of even the best epic under the sun, is a nullity—and ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... In response to an order from the Council, Las Casas wrote his treatise entitled, The Liberty of the Enslaved Indians (De la libertad de los Indios que han sido reducidos a la esclavitud) which, for greater convenience, he divided into three parts. The first part treated of the nullity of the title on which such slavery was based; the second dealt with the duties of the Spanish sovereign towards the Indians, and the third was devoted to the obligations of the bishops of ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... is said to have been done, form no example. If they have any effect in argument, they make an exception to prove the rule. None of your own liberties could stand a moment, if the casual deviations from them at such times were suffered to be used as proofs of their nullity. By the lucrative amount of such casual breaches in the Constitution, judge what the stated and fixed rule of supply has been in that kingdom. Your Irish pensioners would starve, if they had no ...
— Burke's Speech on Conciliation with America • Edmund Burke
... he continued, 'that women whose influence is generally greatest under despotisms, have none now. They have lost it, partly in consequence of the gross vulgarity of our dominant passions, and partly from their own nullity. They are like London houses, all built and furnished on exactly the same model, and that a most uninteresting one. Whether a girl is bred up at home or in a convent, she has the same masters, gets a smattering of the same accomplishments, reads the same dull ...
— Correspondence & Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859, Vol. 2 • Alexis de Tocqueville
... with humanity; here, too (in suffering), he must show his strength, i.e. endure without knowing or feeling his nullity, and reach his perfection again for which the Most High wishes to make ...
— Beethoven: the Man and the Artist - As Revealed in his own Words • Ludwig van Beethoven
... the war ventured to face the English squadrons in the North Sea and in the Channel; and the Dutch mercantile marine disappeared from the ocean. England was strong enough to defy the Armed Neutrality, which indeed proved, as its authoress Catherine II is reported to have said, "an armed nullity." There was deep dissatisfaction throughout the country, and mutual recriminations between the various responsible authorities, but there was some justice in making the stadholder the chief scapegoat, for, whatever may have been the faults of others, ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... Dunbar. But he was still a married man, having wedded Lord Huntly's sister fourteen months before. And now in May, came in the new consistorial jurisdiction of the Archbishop, for the only act which that prelate ever performed under it was to confirm a sentence of nullity of this very marriage, and that on the ground that Bothwell and his wife being too nearly related, had not procured a Papal dispensation (the Papal dispensation having not only been procured before the marriage, but having been granted by the hands of the Archbishop himself as Legate). ...
— John Knox • A. Taylor Innes
... that she was really a good woman and an inability to believe that the King could be misled, much less do her a deliberate and conscious wrong. But some sort of admission which she made before him was interpreted by the Archbishop as involving the nullity of the marriage. Anne was executed: next day, the King married Jane Seymour; the marriage with Anne was officially declared to have been invalid; Elizabeth being of course de-legitimatised, and so occupying ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... chapter in the late John A. Goodwin's "Pilgrim Republic," soon to be published. Perhaps the case of Wade was rather a decree of nullity than ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 5, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 5, May, 1886 • Various
... the thought is busy with far other things will as a rule embody much essential truth. As a force, Egremont would not have weighed in the scale against Dalmaine. Putting himself in conscious opposition to such a man, he had but his due in a sense of nullity. ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... sovereignty. Thus, in spite of the servitude into which the people had sunk at the end of the tenth century, from this moment the enfranchisement of the people makes way. In spite of the weakness, or rather nullity, of the regal power at the same epoch, from this moment the regal power begins to gain ground. That monarchical system which the genius of Charlemagne could not found, kings far inferior to Charlemagne will little by little make triumphant. Those liberties and those guarantees ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... under the broad seal of England."[18] To what extent the new charter established the boundaries of Virginia does not appear, and the subsequent turn of affairs in Virginia made the action of Parliament at this time a nullity. ...
— England in America, 1580-1652 • Lyon Gardiner Tyler
... guests, not that these individuals were very much interested in such matters, for they were of that particular social type which considers that the highest form of good breeding is to show a polite nullity of feeling concerning everything and everybody. They were eminently 'cultured,' which nowadays means pre-eminently dull. Had they been asked, they would have said that it is dangerous to express any opinion on any subject,—even on the architecture ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... a sort of nullity, which more and more terrified Ursula. She felt there was something hopeless which she had to submit to. She felt a great sense of disaster impending. Day after day was made inert with a sense of disaster. ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... share of mortals. Many are of opinion that congress have too frequently made use of the suppliant humble tone of requisition in applications to the states, when they had a right to assert their imperial dignity, and command obedience. Be that as it may, requisitions are a perfect nullity, where thirteen sovereign, independent, disunited states, are in the habit of discussing, and refusing or complying with them at their option. Requisitions are actually little better than a jest and a ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 4 (of 5) • John Marshall
... signs his mark to it; there is no obligation attached at all. He says at once, "That man is an educated man; he has the advantage of me; he shows me that contract; I do not know what is in it; I cannot even read it." Therefore a contract made with a negro in that way is almost a nullity; but if he could read that contract himself and sign his own name to it, it would be a very different thing. I never allow a negro to sign a written contract with me before he has taken it home with him and had some friend to read it over and ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... a route to lead their feet to the Creator, the Assyrians turned their eyes toward the stars, which they contemplated without the power of attaining them. The Guebers have conserved the same belief to our days. In their nullity and spiritual blindness, men are incapable of conceiving the invisible spiritual bond which unites them to the great Divinity, and this explains why they have always sought for palpable things, which were in the domain of the senses, ...
— The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ - The Original Text of Nicolas Notovitch's 1887 Discovery • Nicolas Notovitch
... Senate demanded the gravest thought. It was desired to avoid if possible the drowsy nullity of the Canadian Upper House and the preponderating "bossiness" of the American. Nor did the example of Australia, where the Senate, elected on a "general ticket" over huge provincial areas, becomes thereby a sort of National Labor Convention, give any assistance ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... says—"The offspring of always careless, generally intemperate, and oftentimes dishonest parents, they never see the inside of a school-room, and so far as our excellent system of public education is concerned, it is to them a nullity." It appears that, at that time, in 12 wards of the city, there were 2,955 of these children, of whom two-thirds were females between the ages of 8 and 16. I am informed, also, by the Chief of Police, that 100 per cent. should now be added to this estimate; not all attributable, ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... silence this imputation of nullity; she was not so closely related, after all, that she need allow herself to be disturbed by it. But sister Alice took up the cudgel with all the ardor of an immediate connection and all the sensitiveness of ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... shall be looked into, and if there be no error in your information, I will venture to brave the resentment of my colleagues and the rest, and release this Joy for the present, taking such order in other respects that the remaining sentence of the Court shall not remain a nullity." ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... Spencer and St. Vincent in their letters, and he was distinctly cautioned against letting the enemy get to the westward of him. He might have consoled himself for indecisive action, which procrastinated disaster and covered failure with the veil of nullity, as did a former commander of his in a gazetted letter, by the reflection that, so far as the anticipations of the ministry went, the designs of the enemy were for the time frustrated, by the presence of his squadron between them and ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... marry her sister's husband. Besides she would have needed the Pope's dispensation for such a union—as Philip had already explained to her—while her birth and crown were the results of a Papal dispensation being declared a nullity. She would thus have fallen into a self-contradiction, to which she must have succumbed in course of time. When told that Philip II had done her some service, she acknowledged it: but when she meditated on it further, ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... treasure bestowed upon him might surely release her from a guardianship account. How many men had bought the women they loved by greater sacrifices? Why should a man do less for a wife than for a mistress? Besides, Paul was a nullity, a man of no force, incapable; she would spend the best resources of her mind upon him and open to him a fine career; he should owe his future power and position to her influence; in that way she could pay her debt. He would indeed be ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac
... of the day. Was it to be accepted or, if repudiated, should the authors of the disaster, the causes of the breach of faith, be surrendered in time-honoured fashion to the enemy as an expiation for the violated pledge? On the first point there was little hesitation; the senate decided for the nullity of the treaty, and it was likely that this view would be accepted by the people, if the measures against the ratifying officials were not made too stringent. For on this point there was a difference of opinion. The poorer classes, whose sons and ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... world, with which I had looked out upon life in my Kunstwerk der Zukunft. As a matter of fact, it was Herwegh who at last, by a well-timed explanation, brought me to a calmer frame of mind about my own sensitive feelings. It is from this perception of the nullity of the visible world—so he said—that all tragedy is derived, and such a perception must necessarily have dwelt as an intuition in every great poet, and even in every great man. On looking afresh into my Nibelungen ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... hearth, she looked so gentle, sweet, and lovely. No longer wild and shy, or gayly mischievous and watchful, but calm-eyed, firm-lipped, gravely courteous; intent upon her father's face, and banishing not into shadow so much as absolute nullity any one who dreamed that he ever filled a pitcher for her, or fed her with grouse and partridge, and committed the ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... general rule, nothing can be given or communicated, in the form of the Universal and Indeterminate, for specific object and precise form are requisite for this purpose; otherwise, in fact, that which is presented would not be a reality but a nullity. Such a society, accordingly, can never find a measure or ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... preaching," writes another contemporary,[3183] "rarely culminated in any specific measure or legal provision. He combated everything and proposed nothing; the secret of his policy happily accorded with his intellectual impotence and with the nullity of his legislative conceptions." Once he has rattled his revolutionary pedantry off, he no longer knows what to say.—As to financial matters and military art, he knows nothing and risks nothing, except to underrate or calumniate Carnot and ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... even if there should be information, citation, decree, and verdict obtained by surprise, default, and contumacy, I have still the alternative of a conflict of jurisdiction to gain time, and a resort to the means of nullity that will be ...
— Monsieur de Pourceaugnac • Moliere
... will be satirists or torture-chambers.[12] Yet, though the self-complacent magistrate has been the butt of the ages, Aristophanes and Shakespeare, and perhaps Flaubert, have alone revealed his essential nullity, because they alone have looked for something essential beneath the accidental. Nothing could be simpler than the character of Polonius; nothing could be more subtle. A rap here, a stab there, and the soul of a minister is ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... but he would not marry unless he could feel strong in the joy of it—never. He could not have faced his mother. It seemed to him that to sacrifice himself in a marriage he did not want would be degrading, and would undo all his life, make it a nullity. He would try ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... Bayne found the fire newly alight in the hall, burning with that spare, clear brilliancy that the recent removal of ashes imparts to a wood fire. All the world was still beclouded with mists, and the windows and doors looked forth on a blank white nullity—as inexpressive, as enigmatical, as the unwritten page of the unformulated future itself. The present seemed eliminated; he stood as it were in the atmosphere of other days. But whither had blown the incense of ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... which appals him; if the salt have lost its savour wherewith shall it be salted? This it is which condemns to a swift, and what the poem represents as a just, abolishment from earth the mother who in Ivan Ivanovitch has given her children to the wolves, and has thereby proved the complete nullity of her womanhood. For her there is no possible redemption; she must cease to cumber the ground. Ivan acts merely as the instinctive doomsman of Nature or of God, and the old village Pope, who, as the veil of life grows thin, is feeling after ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... the text," said Lady Ashton, appealing to the divine, "on which you yourself, with cautious reluctance, declared the nullity of the pretended engagement insisted upon by ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... Maintenon. She caused Orry to be reinstated in his former functions, at the same time that one of her most dangerous enemies, the father Daubenton, received an order to quit Madrid, where his restless nullity had lost itself in a maze of intrigues. Authorised in a manner to form her ministry, she nominated the President Amelot as Ambassador for Spain, a diplomatist although very high minded, yet of somewhat subaltern ability, ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... upon the point of going away in the joy of this respite. But his desire to talk delayed him, and he began to talk about the canon law and pre-contracts of marriage. It was a very valid cause of nullity all ...
— The Fifth Queen • Ford Madox Ford
... himself to hear the same innuendo repeated in nearly every note from the Legation. As time went on, Russell was compelled, though slowly, to treat the American Minister as serious. He admitted nothing so unwillingly, for the nullity or fatuity of the Washington Government was his idee fixe; but after the failure of his last effort for joint intervention on November 12, 1862, only one week elapsed before he received a note from Minister Adams repeating his charges ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... soon found herself a nullity at the court of Francois I. Her young husband was in love with Diane de Poitiers, who certainly, in the matter of birth, could rival Catherine, and was far more of a great lady than the little Florentine. The daughter of the Medici was also outdone by Queen Eleonore, sister of Charles V., and by ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... realistically learned draughtsmen, of artists whose work may charm at first glance by some vivid likeness or poetic suggestion, but reveal with every additional day their complete insignificance as movement, their utter empathic nullity. Indeed, if we analyse the censure ostensibly based upon engineering considerations of material instability, or on wrong perspective or anatomical "out of drawing" we shall find that much of this hostile criticism is really that of empathic ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... from Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana was a question of no less interest. It involved the effect of the rebellion upon the relation of the rebelling States to the Union. Could they have a voice in public affairs without specific measures of restoration, or were the acts of secession a nullity without influence upon their legal status? The committee reported in favor of admitting the delegations from these States, without the right to vote. The chairman, Mr. King, was the only member who dissented, and he moved to amend by ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... little time for spiritual tillage either at home or abroad. Not only the bishops had to confirm, ordain to all orders, consecrate, anoint, impose penance, and excommunicate, but they had to decide land questions concerning lands in frank almoin, all probate and nullity of marriage cases, and to do all the legal work of a king's baron besides. The judicial duties lay heavily upon him. He used to say that a bishop's case was harder than a lord warden's or a mayor's, for he had to be always on the bench; they only sometimes. They might look ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson
... currents of his age. His conception of marriage made no more impression on contemporary life than his Paradise Lost. Even his own Puritan party who had passed the Act of 1653 had strangely failed to transfer divorce and nullity cases to the temporal courts, which would at least have been a step on the right road. The Puritan influence was transferred to America and constituted the leaven which still works in producing the liberal though too minutely detailed ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... which, in its ardour for beauty and its reverence for great historic associations, has lately disbursed after only a few months' hesitation L250,000 to save the Crystal Palace, where the bank holidays of millions of toilers have been spoilt by the utter gloom and nullity of the place—a nullity and gloom that will, however and of course, be dispelled so soon as the place is devoted to permanent exhibitions of New Zealand pippins, Rhodesian tobacco, Australian mutton, Canadian snow-shoes, and other glories of Empire—might surely not be asked in vain to'—but ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... only one, it will insist on being master of the joint deliberations; if there be two, they will be irresistible when they agree; and whenever they differ, every thing will be decided by a struggle for ascendancy between the rivals. This cause is alone enough to reduce the German Bund to almost a nullity, independently of its wretched internal constitution. It effects none of the real purposes of a confederation. It has never bestowed on Germany a uniform system of customs, nor so much as a uniform coinage, and has served only to give Austria and Prussia a legal right ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... instant; he sees with affright the gloom and solitude around him; people sing who are afraid in the dark, but he keeps moving. He makes a fuss, he goes at everything, he runs after projects; being unable to create, he decrees; he endeavours to mask his nullity; he is perpetual motion; but, alas! the wheel turns in empty space. Conversion of rentes? Of what profit has it been to this day? Saving of eighteen millions! Very good: the annuitants lose them, but the President and the Senate, ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo |
