"Objectless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in prose and verse, but without energy or aim. He was not fixed in any plan of life. His letters—for he wrote with abundance, and something undefined seems to have induced his family to keep his letters—are steeped in sombre and objectless melancholy. He was tormented by presentiments of misfortune; he indulged a kind of romantic valetudinarianism. In the confusion of his spirit as he passed uneasily from boyhood into manhood, the principal moral quality we perceive is ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... another. In some constitutions there is a natural chemistry, and those constitutions may produce chemic wonders,—in others a natural fluid, call it electricity, and these may produce electric wonders. But the wonders differ from Normal Science in this,—they are alike objectless, purposeless, puerile, frivolous. They lead on to no grand results; and therefore the world does not heed, and true sages have not cultivated them. But sure I am, that of all I saw or heard, a man, human as myself, was the remote originator; and I believe unconsciously ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... fighting—not such brushes as that I witnessed at Irun—might take place, was a mystery. The movements of the Republican leaders were inexplicable, and conducted in contravention of all known principles of the art of war. They harassed their men by long and objectless marches. They ordered towns to be put in a state of defence at first, and then withdrew the garrisons. They engaged whole columns in defiles, where a company of invisible guerrilleros could tease them. ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... a time, to lie around in vacuous idleness —to spend days that should be crowded full of action in a monotonous, objectless routine of hunting lice, gathering at roll-call, and drawing and cooking our scanty ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... feared. That he might also be a rival in his profession, that he was so rich that he was far above the straits in which Morris found himself more and more frequently involved, only added to the flame that consumed him; life without Silvia herself would be dull, colorless, objectless; life without her music would be but "wind ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens
... helplessness in Rome as he hobbled up the steps of Montecitorio in 1874, was saddening to all beholders, and prepared his friends for that end which, however, was to be put off for several years. The fatigue of the voyage from Caprera in 1879, and still more the excitement of incessant calls, objectless conferences, and endless exhibitions soon entirely prostrated the hero, and before the backward spring had fully set in it became evident that Garibaldi's life could ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 2 of 8 • Various
... might speak of them—and, without violation of the spirit of true philosophy, call upon them to bear testimony to the truth. But think of the calm, purified, enlightened, and elevated conscience of the highest natures—from which objectless fear has been excluded—and which hears, in its stillness, the eternal voice of God. What calm celestial joy fills all the being of a good man, when conscience tells him he is obeying God's law! What dismal fear and sudden remorse assail him, whenever he swerves but one single step out of the right ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... ventured to look out of their warm beds in the mould. Sutherland, therefore, had made but few discoveries in the neighbourhood. Not that the weather would have kept him to the house, had he had any particular desire to go out; but, like many other students, he had no predilection for objectless exertion, and preferred the choice of his own weather indoors, namely, from books and his own imaginings, to an encounter with the keen blasts of the North, charged as they often were with sharp bullets ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... purpose with which those islands were shaped out of the void, and the torpid waters enclosed with their desolate walls of sand! How little could we have known, any more than of what now seems to us most distressful, dark, and objectless, the glorious aim which was then in the mind of Him in whose hand are all the corners of the earth! how little imagined that in the laws which were stretching forth the gloomy margins of those fruitless banks, and feeding ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... not that the frowning ones did not go through many of the same motions themselves; but theirs were occasioned by the frenzy of the religious excitement, where pious rapture and ecstasy were to be expressed by nothing but the bodily exertion of the Shout: the objectless dance of the dancer was a thing beyond their comprehension, dimly at first, and then positively, associated with sin. But she laughed them down with a gibe; she felt triumphant in the possession of her secret, known to none of them: her dance ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... cock's feather in his hat is blown upright, till it seems as if it stood on end with fear. His features are not visible, for he has grasped his cloak with both hands, and drawn it from either side across his face. The picture is seemingly objectless. It tells no tale, but there is a weird power about it that haunts one, and it was for that I ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... How miserably imbecile and objectless has the English government of Ireland been for forty years past! Oh! for a great man—but one really great man,— who could feel the weight and the power of a principle, and unflinchingly put it into act! But truly there is no vision in the land, and the people accordingly ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... beneath consciousness, so there is another work which is above consciousness, and which, also, is not accompanied with the feeling of egoism .... There is no feeling of I, and yet the mind works, desireless, free from restlessness, objectless, bodiless. Then the Truth shines in its full effulgence, and we know ourselves—for Samadhi lies potential in us all—for what we truly are, free, immortal, omnipotent, loosed from the finite, and its contrasts of good and evil altogether, and identical with ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... action, to which he considered himself forced, could not have been better chosen had he had nothing at heart but the aim of furthering his own interests. In Rose's imagination he had always formed an admirable contrast to the purposeless, objectless young men of her acquaintance, and his wise withdrawal after he had roused her interest, she interpreted as indifference. So let it be, thought the young lady, assuming a feeling of entire content. But assumed feelings are not lasting. She who had been the life of society now grew very weary of ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... sight and sound of the hotel; but the dull, indignant passion remained in his heart, finding outward vent in the violence with which he sent the canoe bounding northward beneath the starlight. For the moment it was a blind, objectless passion, directed against nothing and no one in particular. He was not skilled in the analysis of feeling, or in tracing effect to cause. For an hour or two his wrath was the rage of the infuriated animal roaring out its pain, regardless of the hand that has ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... nothing, but turned from her and moved towards a table covered with books. In an objectless way he opened a volume and looked at the title page. Matilde followed him ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... things. She could not have said exactly what she did expect. But, at least, the cottage on Staten Island offered a resting-place on her journey, even if it could not be the journey's end. Her mad dash from Mervo ceased to be objectless. ...
— The Prince and Betty - (American edition) • P. G. Wodehouse
... follow me," I agreed. "Her coming seems to have steadied us up all round. The changes which we were obliged to make in our manner of living have all been for the better. I am afraid that we were drifting, Allan and I, at any rate into a somewhat objectless sort of existence, and our work was beginning to show the signs of it. The coming of Isobel seems to have changed all that. You, Allan, know that you have never done better work in your life than during the last year. ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... is the truth that when we see things for the first time we feel instantly that they are fictive creations; we feel the finger of God. It is only when we are thoroughly used to them and our five wits are wearied, that we see them as wild and objectless; like the shapeless tree-tops or the shifting cloud. It is the design in Nature that strikes us first; the sense of the crosses and confusions in that design only comes afterwards through experience and an almost eerie monotony. If a man ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... which intervene between the Rue Richelieu and the Rue St. Roch. It was late in the afternoon when we reached it; as this quarter is at a great distance from that in which we resided. The house was readily found; for there were still many persons gazing up at the closed shutters, with an objectless curiosity, from the opposite side of the way. It was an ordinary Parisian house, with a gateway, on one side of which was a glazed watch-box, with a sliding panel in the window, indicating a loge de concierge. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... the North were sure of an easy and complete victory—short, of course, of actual subjugation of the South (which no one dreams of)—the war which was to end in such a victory would still be, in the eyes of prudence and worldly wisdom, an objectless and unprofitable folly[319]." But by the middle of June the American irritation at the British Proclamation of Neutrality, loudly and angrily voiced by the Northern press, had caused a British press ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... and to Naples, wandering about in an objectless sort of way. He dreaded to go to Milan, because he had not heard that Dr. Paltravi was dead, and it would have been very hard for him to have to explain to the sick man why he had decided not to carry out his wishes. Apart from ...
— John Gayther's Garden and the Stories Told Therein • Frank R. Stockton
... at six and seven o'clock, a few even earlier; they have sipped their modicum of sulphur and scandal, have prolonged the event as fully as possible, and must now ripple irregularly back toward the town, objectless entirely until the noon music ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... observable change came over the features of the mental disorder of my friend. His ordinary manner had vanished. His ordinary occupations were neglected or forgotten. He roamed from chamber to chamber with hurried, unequal, and objectless step. The pallor of his countenance had assumed, if possible, a more ghastly hue—but the luminousness of his eye had utterly gone out. The once occasional huskiness of his tone was heard no more; and a tremulous quaver, as if of extreme terror, habitually ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... did not thus follow or accompany the first; and this was extremely marked in the violent reaching for which the right hand was mainly used. This movement was almost invariably accompanied by an objectless and fruitless symmetrical movement of ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... stars, yet far beyond the power of mountain and valley, forest and lake, waterfall and ocean, did that scene, which was no scene, or next to none, bind me in the spell of its fascination. The motion of our craft, as we careered noiselessly through the shoreless and objectless void, without sense of effort or friction, was a charm of itself,—bringing to a flower, crystallizing into refulgent stars, the dim, obscure, however glorious, poetry of life. Here were the wildest imaginations of the dreamer melted in a crucible, and reproduced ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various |
