"Vacuity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... term between her ancient magnificence, under the successors of Alexander and Augustus, and the modern aspect of Turkish desolation. The Tetrapolis, or four cities, if they retained their name and position, must have left a large vacuity in a circumference of twelve miles; and that measure, as well as the number of four hundred towers, are not perfectly consistent with the five gates, so often mentioned in the history of the siege. ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... blessedness, and the withdrawal of all external causes of disquiet and weariness and weeping, still the heart would hunger and be empty of its true possession unless God Himself had flowed into it. It were but a poor advancement and the gain of a loss, if yearnings were made immortal, and the aching vacuity, which haunts every soul that is parted from God, were cursed with immortality. It would be so, if it be not true that the inheritance is nothing less than the fuller ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... off, Mother," said Anthony, who although vaguely aware that she was endeavouring to create an atmosphere of vacuity, could not fathom ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... the nasals, premaxillaries, and fore-part of the lower jaw, which is unusually curved upwards to come into contact with the premaxillaries. The nasal bones are about one-third the ordinary length, but retain almost their normal breadth. The triangular vacuity is left between them, the frontal and lachrymal, which latter bone articulates with the premaxillary, and thus excludes the maxillary from any junction with the nasal." So that even the connexion of some of the bones is changed. Other differences might be added: ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... made to feel the slow crawling of time, while Eugenie waited; but what is there in her life to account for the time, to bridge the interval, to illustrate its extent? Balzac has to make a long impression of vacuity; Eugenie Grandet contains a decidedly ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... combined with the preceding. To maintain purity, the mind must be occupied. If left without occupation, the vacuity is quickly filled with unchaste thoughts. Nothing can be worse for a child than to be reared in idleness. His morals will be certain to suffer. Incessant mental occupation is the only safeguard against unchastity. Those worthless fops who spend their lives in "killing time" by ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... 0. Nothing; vacuity. It probably means the orb or boundary of the earth.—10. is the first boundary, [Hebrew: tchwm], Tekum, [Greek: Deka], Decem, "terminus." Something more yet remains to be said, I think, on the names of the letters. Cf. "Table of Alphabets" ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 51, October 19, 1850 • Various
... unsettled I could not do anything; I tried to read, but I could not; I tried to eat, but my appetite was gone. I sat looking at the ocean as it rolled wave after wave, sometimes wondering whether it would ever bring a fellow-creature to join me; at others I sat, and for hours, in perfect vacuity of thought. The evening closed in, it was dark, and I still remained seated where I was. At last I returned to my bed, almost broken-hearted; but fortunately I was soon asleep, and ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Frederick Marryat
... to lessen the boy's remorse) scrupled not to accept; and thus, so similar often are the effects of virtue and of vice, the exemplary MacGrawler conspired with the unprincipled Long Ned and the heartless Henry Finish in producing that unenviable state of vacuity which now saddened ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... "Which of these suppositions is most credible it is not needful here to enquire. The deeper question, into which this finally merges, is, whether any one of these is even conceivable in the true sense of the word." He shows that, since the mind refuses to accept the transformation of absolute vacuity into the existent, the theory of self-creation forces us back to a potential Universe whose self-creation was transition to an actual Universe, and that then, we must explain the existence of the potential Universe and that, ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... indulgence, if indulgence it may be called when nothing higher occupies the mind, and reader as well as writer find their chief interest therein. This is because vulgar natures, if overstrained, can only be refreshed by vacuity; and even a higher intelligence, when not sustained by a proportional culture, can only rest from its work amidst sensuous enjoyments, from ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... every thing by the force of the character he impresses upon them. His mind lends its own power to the objects which it contemplates, instead of borrowing it from them. He takes advantage even of the nakedness and dreary vacuity of his subject. His imagination peoples the shades of death, and broods over the silent air. He is the severest of all writers, the most hard and impenetrable, the most opposite to the flowery and glittering; who ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... or a sneer; he waited for him to kick and annoy him as he came out of, or went in to, the schoolroom. In fact, he did his very best to make the boy's life miserable, and the occupation of hating him seemed in some measure to fill up the vacuity of an ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... And he suddenly thought of Florence, the clog-dancer. He had scarcely thought of her for months. The complexity of the interests of life, and the interweaving of its moods, fatigued his mind into an agreeably grave vacuity. ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... was how he had been living all these days since his return home, without suffering so acutely from the vacuity of his existence and from inaction. How had he spent his time from rising in ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... wash a face which was of necessity always clean. I don't know how much fancy there was in this; but there is no fancy in saying that the lassitude of tired-out operatives, and the languor of imaginative natures in their periods of collapse, and the vacuity of minds untrained to labor and discipline, fit the soul and body for the germination of ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... admit them to the Alphabet, but afterwards debar them from Books? Do we fear their rashness? The more we occupy their thoughts, the less room will there be in them for rashness, which springs generally from vacuity of mind." Some slight limitations as to the reading proper for young women are appended, but with a hint that the same limitations would be good for youth of the other sex; and there is a bold quotation of the Scriptural text (1 Tim. ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... in a low tone, and assuming a quite unnecessary look of vacuity for the benefit of the husband, who gazed across the dim-lit room at them, "don't behave like an idiot; faithful wives never let their husbands see them looking like that at another man's fingers. What do you think of our monsher? ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... with a determined gaze fixed straight before him on vacuity, and with a desperate affectation of spontaneity in his tone—"Well, Madeline, mother and father have gone to Aunt Marcia's, I suppose to spend a ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... all things. This celestial light satiates the hunger of the soul; every desire is precluded; and they have a fulness of joy which sets them above all that mortals seek with such restless ardor, to fill the vacuity that aches forever in their breast. All the delightful objects that surround them are disregarded; for their felicity springs up within, and, being perfect, can derive nothing from without. So the gods, satiated with nectar and ambrosia, disdain, as gross and ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... little of what transpired outside could be seen through the thick glass ports. The pirate ship loomed over them like a monstrous leech, its bolts sharply etched in black and white by the sunlight from their stern. Beyond that was only the velvety darkness—the absolute vacuity of space that carries no sound, refracts no light. A battle was raging out there, but of that nothing could be seen or heard in the salon. Only a dull, booming vibration through the flyer's hull, made by the rockets in a useless effort to shake off ...
— In the Orbit of Saturn • Roman Frederick Starzl
... thing, blowing smoke out of our mouths into other people's mouths, eyes, and noses, and having the same thing done to us. Yet I cannot account why a thing which requires so little exertion and yet preserves the mind from total vacuity has gone out." Or if we demand a keener relish for our meal than these {46} quiet joys of observation, there is of course the whole store of Johnson's sallies of wit, the things we all quote and forget and like to have recalled ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... presides in it (the king) comes before them it is debated on with the spirit of men, and in the language of gentlemen; and their answer or their address is returned in the same style. They stand not aloof with the gaping vacuity of vulgar ignorance, nor bend with the cringe of sycophantic insignificance. The graceful pride of truth knows no extremes, and preserves, in every latitude of life, the ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... asked Ted, with a face in which there might be read such a compound of cunning, vacuity, and ferocity as could rarely be ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... highest instruments of life. Even the mineral kingdom is supposed to be swayed by the moon; for in Scotland, Martin says, "The natives told me, that the rock on the east side of Harries, in the Sound of Island Glass, hath a vacuity near the front, on the north-west side of the Sound; in which they say there is a stone that they call the Lunar Stone, which advances and retires according to the increase and decrease of the moon." [323] An ancient instance ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... before, and had felt no fear of them. But something kept drumming into his ears at this instant with irritating insistence that this was not an ordinary man; that standing before him, within three paces, his eyes swimming in an unfixed vacuity which indicated preparation for violent action, was Harlan—"Drag" Harlan, the Pardo two-gun man; Harlan, who had never been beaten in ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... gilds with varying rays Those painted clouds that beautify our days; Each want of happiness by hope supplied, And each vacuity of sense by pride: These build as fast as knowledge can destroy; In Folly's cup still laughs the bubble, joy; One prospect lost, another still we gain; And not a vanity is given in vain; 290 Even mean self-love ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... element was undoubtedly strong in him. He liked pleasant gardens; set a high value on leisure and even vacuity; did not disdain novels; and had the sense to prefer good wine to bad. When he travelled in later life he showed none of the over-praised desire to acquire information for information's sake. While his companions were 'getting up' the Pyramids, or antiquities in the Troad, or the ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 7: A Sketch • John Morley
... Gospels are represented by "The Prodigal," where the outcast is seen crouching on the ground, his face fixed on vacuity, almost in the act of coming to himself. "For he had Great Possessions," is, however, the greatest and simplest of all. There the young man who went away sorrowful with bowed head, scarcely knowing what he has lost, is used by Watts as one of his most ...
— Watts (1817-1904) • William Loftus Hare
... doubly blest, if Love supply Lustre to this now heavy eye, And with unwonted Spirit grace That fat[32:A] vacuity of face. Or if e'en Love, the mighty Love Shall find this change his power above; Some lovely maid perchance thou'lt find To read thy visage in ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... vacuity. Just as skeletons always seem mysteriously elate. Their pride is an absence of everything else—a sort of rigid finery they put on in lieu of a shroud. Never mind staring after them, please. They are Mr. and Mrs. Jalonick who live across the street from my home. I dislike staring even after truths. ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... rising tier on tier, discovered to my critical inspection by such sunbeams as forced their way through the narrow Gothic lattices of the Laigh Kirk of Glasgow; and, having illuminated the attentive congregation, lost themselves in the vacuity of the vaults behind, giving to the nearer part of their labyrinth a sort of imperfect twilight, and leaving their recesses in an utter darkness, which gave them the appearance ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... who needed kindness. There remains in my mind the dreary sense of a long, long drive to the uttermost bounds of the South End at Boston, where he went to call upon some obscure person whose claim stretched in a lengthening chain from his early days in Missouri—a most inadequate person, in whose vacuity the gloom of the dull day deepened till it was almost too deep for tears. He bore the ordeal with grim heroism, and silently smoked away the sense of it, as we drove back to Cambridge, in his slippered ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... grief, Hell was more grateful than thy native land. Ah, what, but hell, has Italy become? And thy sweet cords Still trembled at the touch of thy right hand, Unhappy bard of love. Alas, Italian song is still the child Of sorrow born. And yet, less hard to bear, Consuming grief than dull vacuity! O blessed thou, whose life was one lament! Disgust and nothingness are still our doom, And by our cradle ...
— The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi • Giacomo Leopardi
... edifice, the rigors of the hour and occasion reached their climax. The shivering gas-jets lit up the austere pallor of the bare walls, and the hollow, shell-like sweep of colorless vacuity behind the cold communion table. The chill of despair and hopeless renunciation was in the air, untempered by any glow from the sealed air-tight stove that seemed only to bring out a lukewarm exhalation of wet clothes and cheaply dyed umbrellas. Nor did the presence ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte
... mouth walks through the regions of a man's brain, drives out all ill vapors but itself, draws down all bad humors by the mouth, which in time might breed a scab over the whole body, if already they have not; a plant of singular use; for, on the one side Nature being an enemy to vacuity and emptiness and on the other, there being so many empty brains in the world as there are, how shall Nature's course be continued? How shall those empty brains be filled but with air, Nature's immediate instrument to that purpose? If with air, ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... Observatory, erected in the reign of Louis XV; it is a most curious piece of architecture, having in it neither wood nor iron; it is not a large building, but has a fine appearance, and Perrault was the architect; it is vaulted throughout, and a geometrical staircase, having a vacuity of 170 feet deep, merits particular notice. There is a circular universal chart upon the pavement of one of the apartments. By means of mechanical arrangements the roof and cupola open, and every night, ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... fertile fancy. We know not if in the world's vast library there is any reliable exhibition of such causes. Sir Walter Scott's imaginary Clutterbuck, after some prefatory doubts, leaves the following as perhaps his principal reason: "This happy vacuity of all employment appeared to me so delicious, that it became the primary hint, which, according to the system of Helvetius, as the minister says, determined my infant talents towards the profession I was destined to illustrate." Such may be the idea of some at the present day, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... head very erect; the red spots in her cheeks glowed like double peonies; her two thin curls, done in oil for the occasion, hung straight and stiff like pendant icicles nigrescent; her sparkling black eyes looked apparently into vacuity, while they were really beholding the acme of all her hopes. She was thinking in that supreme moment of her life how very providential it was that she had thrown overboard Mr. Freeman Clarke. Whether he was picked up or whether the sharks devoured him, it occurred ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... upon him of what follows the reader must remember that it was an experience which came amid a deep sense of vacuity in life. The fairest products of [129] the earth seemed to be dropping to pieces, as if in men's very hands, around him. How real was their sorrow, and his! "His observation of life" had come to be like the constant telling of a sorrowful rosary, day after day; till, as if ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... mean in the instance of the particle (the). When this particle precedes a vowel, shall he melt it into the substantive, or leave the hiatus open? Both practices are offensive to a delicate ear. The particle absorbed occasions harshness, and the open vowel a vacuity equally inconvenient. Sometimes, therefore, to leave it open, and sometimes to ingraft it into its adjunct seems most advisable; this course Mr. Pope has taken, whose authority recommended it to me; though ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... pressure and a state of melancholy enervation. Then he becomes tired, lazy, afraid of work, fearful of everything great; and hating himself. He looks into his own breast, analyses his faculties, and finds he is only peering into hollow and chaotic vacuity. And then he once more falls from the heights of his eagerly-desired self-knowledge into an ironical scepticism. He divests his struggles of their real importance, and feels himself ready to undertake any class of useful work, however degrading. ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche
... necessarily self-existent and independent, it is not the first; if it has a dependent existence, there must be a prior being on which it depends. If the First Cause is not eternal, then prior to this Ultimate Cause there was nothingness and vacuity, and pure nothing, by its own act, became something. But "Ex nihilo nihil" is a universal law of thought. To ask the question whether the First Cause be self-existent and eternal, is, in effect, to ask the question "who made God?" and this is not ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... had so recently been able to discover within himself. During this profound and soothing communion with his innermost beliefs he remained staring at the carpet, with a portentously solemn face and with a dull vacuity of eyes that seemed to gaze into the blankness of an empty hole. Then, without stirring in ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... and he listened to my words with something of self-collectedness—albeit slight tremblings might still be seen to run along his nerves at intervals; and his features collapsed, ever and anon, into that momentary vacuity of wildness which the touch of despair never fails to give. I endeavoured to improve the occasion. I exhorted him, for his soul's sake, and the relief of that which needed it too much, to make a full ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various
... of punishment; for pronouncing them, his tongue cut out; and for committing them to memory, his body cut in two. [12] The Veda was never to be read in the presence of a Sudra; and no sacrifice was to be performed for him. [13] The Sudras, it is stated in the Harivansha, are sprung from vacuity, and are destitute of ceremonies, and so are not entitled to the rites of initiation. Just as upon the friction of wood, the cloud of smoke which issues from the fire and spreads around is of no service in the sacrificial ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... blowing smoke out of our mouths into other people's mouths, eyes, and noses, and having the same thing done to us. Yet I cannot account, why a thing which requires so little exertion, and yet preserves the mind from total vacuity, should have gone out. Every man has something by which he calms himself: beating with his feet, or so. [Footnote: Dr Johnson used to practice this himself very much.] I remember when people in England ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... should it be decided on a scrutiny that the seat belonged to our hero, then he would enter upon his privilege in the following Session without any further trouble to himself at Tankerville. Should this not be the case,—then the abyss of absolute vacuity would be open before him. He would have to make some disposition of himself, but he would be absolutely without an idea as to the how or where. He was in possession of funds to support himself for a year or two; but after that, and even during that time, all would be dark. If he should get ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... no scene so perfectly brings out the absolute vacuity of the British mind when one can get it free from the replenishing influences of the daily paper. Alpine talk is the lowest variety of conversation, as the common run of Alpine writing is the lowest form of literature. It is in fact simply drawing-room talk as drawing-room ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... but it was the first time, and the place was new to her. After breakfast was cleared away I proceeded to give directions for dinner; it was merely a plain joint of meat, I said, to be roasted in the tin oven. The experienced cook looked at me with a stare of entire vacuity. "The tin oven," I repeated, ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... that this state of things was the actual beginning. There is no necessary connexion between the first verse of Genesis and the succeeding. The beginning of the existence of matter, and the state of vacuity and darkness whence the present order of things emerged, may have been, so far as the text is concerned, and were, as we know from appearances, separated from each other ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... never caught sight of at all. She had been hiding from him even in his presence. In every aspect she was an anger. But she could talk to the fellow with her ... a skinny whipper-snapper, whom the breath of a man could shred into remote, eyeless vacuity. Was this man another insult? Did she not even wait to bury her dead? Pah! she was not value for his thought. A girl so lightly facile might be blown from here to there and she would scarcely notice the difference. Here and there were the same places to her, and him and him were the same person. ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... them off, however, the old sense of hollowness was upon him again. His life there reminded him of a gaudy drop-scene, let down before an empty stage; a painted sham, with darkness and vacuity behind. At bottom, none of these distinctions and successes meant anything to him; not a scrap of mental pabulum could be got from them: rather would he have chosen to be poor and a nobody among people whose thoughts flew to meet his ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... imagine that he is a backslidden communist, and is sure he will go to hell (if there be such an excellent institution) for the luxury in which he lives? And can you believe that, though it is gaily expressed, the thought is hag and skeleton in every moment of vacuity or depression? Can you conceive how profoundly I am irritated by the opposite affectation to my own, when I see strong men and rich men bleating about their sorrows and the burthen of life, in a world full of 'cancerous paupers,' and poor sick children, and the fatally ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... beginning of the season which is called Silly in the world of journalism, because the outer vacuity then responds to the inner, and the empty brain vainly interrogates the empty environment for something to write of, two friends of the Easy Chair offered to spend a holiday in search of material for a paper. The only conditions they made were that the Easy Chair should not ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... object of these glances sat apparently lost in vacuity, or patiently waiting the end of the services,—when all at once, during the hymn, he sprang to his feet; at the same moment two or three beside him felt as if they had experienced an electric shock. What was it? A voice joined the soprano singer in one single strain, brief ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... the immense caves of Maastricht, how they stretch themselves out into deep passages and vast squares, in which sound is lost, and where the light, which cannot reach the nearest object, only glimmers like a point of fire. In order to comprehend this vacuity and this darkness, the travellers let the guide extinguish his torch, and all is night; they are penetrated, as it were, with darkness; the hand feels after a wall, in order to have some restraint, some thought on which to repose itself: the eye sees nothing; the ear hears nothing. Horror ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... balance is disturbed we are drawn into strange pathways, and our whole lives may be changed through the operation of what seems a most trivial case. In Bob's case the cause approached, all unheralded, in the person of Mr. Richard Cady, a youth whose magnificent vacuity of purpose was the envy of his friends. Comet-like, he was destined to appear, flash brightly, then disappear below the horizon of this tale. Mr. Cady greeted Bob with listless enthusiasm, teetering the while upon his cane ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... Mannie Kantor so marred in the mysterious and ceramic process of life that the brain and the soul had stayed back sooner than inhabit him. Seventeen in years, in the down upon his face, and in growth unretarded by any great nervosity of system, his vacuity of face was not that of childhood but rather as if his light eyes were peering out from some hinterland and wanting so terribly and so dumbly to communicate what they beheld to brain-cells closed ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... Signorelli's characteristics of drawing, and sit with wide-spread knees and broadly-painted draperies, a striking contrast to the weak attitudes and niggling robes of the central group. Signorelli has indeed hardly altered the childish chubby features of the Deacon in the middle, nor the benevolent vacuity of the two Bishops, so different to his own ...
— Luca Signorelli • Maud Cruttwell
... open, where the mount above One solid mass retires, I spent, with toil, And both, uncertain of the way, we stood, Upon a plain more lonesome, than the roads That traverse desert wilds. From whence the brink Borders upon vacuity, to foot Of the steep bank, that rises still, the space Had measur'd thrice the stature of a man: And, distant as mine eye could wing its flight, To leftward now and now to right dispatch'd, That cornice equal in extent appear'd. Not yet our feet had on that ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... never was a wife, was only too apparent. She touched her, sprinkled water on her pale face, and, as the fixed eyes opened suddenly, Charlotte started at their strange wild glare: they glittered with a freezing brilliancy, and stared around with the vacuity of an image. Could Margaret be mad? She bit her tender lips with sullen rage, and a gnashing desperation; her cheek was cold, white, and clammy as the cheek of a corpse; her hair, still woven with the strings of pearl she often wore, hung ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... summing up the results of the Education Act, Professor Magnus Maclean says: "Among the good things that education has brought the Highlanders, are a knowledge of English, wider social and political interests, a brighter intelligence and brighter outlook, freedom from mental vacuity ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... smoothed for a moment the pillow of an "upper berth," and pleased better than the negro porter. Half a dozen of those days of too many paper novels, of too much tobacco, of too little else, followed each other with the sameness of so many raw oysters. Then there came a chill night of wide moonlit vacuity passed on the prairie by the side of the driver of a "jumper,"—a driver who slumbered, happy man!—and at peep of dawn I found myself standing, stiff and shivering, in a certain little Texas town. A much-soiled, white little street, a bit of greenish-yellow, treeless ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... is no end to the fallacies and confusions of Mr. Fergusson's arrangement. It is a perfect entanglement of gun-cotton, and explodes into vacuity wherever one holds a light to it. I shall leave him to do so with the rest of it for himself, and should perhaps have left it to his own handling altogether, but for the intemperateness of the spirit with which he has spoken on a subject perhaps ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... and I agree that the revelation is, if anything non-emotional. It is utterly flat. It is, as Mr. Blood says, 'the one sole and sufficient insight why, or not why, but how, the present is pushed on by the past, and sucked forward by the vacuity of the future. Its inevitableness defeats all attempts at stopping or accounting for it. It is all precedence and presupposition, and questioning is in regard to it forever too late. It is an initiation ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... condition. As a force, there is a sense in which it is true to call liberty a negation. As a condition, though it may still be a negation, yet it may be indispensable for the production of certain positive results. The vacuity of an exhausted receiver is not a force, but it is the indispensable condition of certain positive operations. Liberty as a force may be as impotent as its opponents allege. This does not affect its value as a preliminary or accompanying condition. The absence of a strait-waistcoat ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... light that shot through the narrow slit which served for a window—'is he not there? Stand out o' the light, and let me look upon him ance mair. But the darkness is in my ain een,' she said, sinking back, after an earnest gaze upon vacuity; 'it's a' ended now, Pass breath, Come death!' And, sinking back upon her couch of straw, she expired without a groan. The clergyman and the surgeon carefully noted down all that she had said, now deeply regretting they had not ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... needed to show the vacuity of all this brutum fulmen. Dreiser, in point of fact, is scarcely more the realist or the naturalist, in any true sense, than H. G. Wells or the later George Moore, nor has he ever announced himself in either the one character ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... yourself by works instead o' leanin' onto Him! Find Him, sez you! Git Him, sez you! Works is vain. Glory! glory!" he continued, with fluent vacuity ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte
... a moment what can be meant by a sensation of Space. Does it not look very like a contradiction in terms? Pure Space, if it means anything, means absolute material emptiness and vacuity. How, then, by any possibility can it give rise to a sensation? What sensory organ can it be conceived as affecting? How and in what ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip
... out, it seemed to him—and usually unjustly—as if people were nudging each other; hands, pointing out-stretched fingers at him, appeared to grow from every eye. At home he found nothing but desolation, vacuity, sorrow, and a child, who constantly tore open the burning, gnawing wounds in his heart. Ulrich must forget "the viper," and he sternly forbade him to speak of his mother; but not a day passed on which he would not ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the thorough gentleman. Yet she did not realize what an utter fool he was, so clever had he been in the use of the art of discreet silence. Norman suspected him, but could not believe a human being capable of such fathomless vacuity as he found whenever he tried to explore ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... circumstances, can only be known by the neat appearance of the boys, in their shiny boots and clean, boiled shirts, as they make their early morning entree for company inspection of arms and accouterments, after which, all is dullness and vacuity. There is a sensible void, apparent to all, requiring something to remove the depressing dullness now surrounding them; and that something is to be found only in the presence of an accommodating and pleasing chaplain. Being to-day ...
— Incidents of the War: Humorous, Pathetic, and Descriptive • Alf Burnett
... seas that are there; when the ivory-tusked Pequod sharply bowed to the blast, and gored the dark waves in her madness, till, like showers of silver chips, the foam-flakes flew over her bulwarks; then all this desolate vacuity of life went away, but gave place to ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... despair, madness, and self-contempt, George Aspel stood holding on to the railings and glaring into vacuity. Recovering himself he staggered home ...
— Post Haste • R.M. Ballantyne
... relief party organized by Messrs. Eddy and Foster were successful in reaching the party which Reed had left. A shocking spectacle was presented to the eyes of the adventurers at the "Starved Camp" as they rightly named it. Patrick Brinn and his wife were sunning themselves with a look of vacuity upon their faces. They had eaten the two children of Jacob Donner: Mrs. Graves' body was lying near them with almost all the flesh cut from the arms and limbs. Her breasts, heart, and liver were then being boiled over the ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... compelled to step entirely out of her olden sphere, and earn her daily bread, there would have been a sharp, bitter fight, but the bracing mental atmosphere might have dispelled the thick darkness, the chilling vacuity, and evolved from the discordant elements a questioning and not easily satisfied soul, but one destined to develop into strength and nobler uses. But here, she said to herself, there was nothing. Friendship could ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... seriousness, masked with a most winning gayety, a light irony, a fine scorn that was rather for herself than for others. She had thought herself out of all sympathy with her environment; she knew its falsehood, its vacuity, its hopelessness; but she necessarily remained in it and of it. She was as much at odds in it as I was, without my poor privilege of criticism and protest, for, as she said, she could not set herself up as a censor of things that she must keep on doing as other people did. She could ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... can write what I please. I see no reason why I should not have the same thought, the same power of expression, to-morrow. What I write, whilst I write it, seems the most natural thing in the world: but yesterday I saw a dreary vacuity in this direction in which now I see so much; and a month hence, I doubt not, I shall wonder who he was that wrote so many continuous pages. Alas for this infirm faith, this will not strenuous, this vast ebb of a vast flow! I am God in nature; I am ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... Academies & Manufactures" to Lewis the Fifteenth, above which is a delicate headpiece by M. Charles-Nicolas Cochin (the greatest of the family), where a couple of that artist's well-nourished amorini, insecurely attached to festoons, distribute palms and laurels in vacuity under a coroneted oval displaying fishes. For Monsieur Abel-Francois Poisson, Marquis de Marigny et de Menars, was the younger brother of Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, the celebrated Marquise de Pompadour. Cochin's etching is dated "1754"; and the "Approbation" at the end of the volume bears his signature ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... tenth verse of Curzon's poem, allusion is made to Lady Pembroke's conversation, which though not consciously pretentious, provoked considerable merriment. She "stumbled upwards into vacuity," to quote my dear ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... of man is not to be known by this test: a great fondness for music is a mark of great weakness, great vacuity of mind: not of hardness of heart; not of vice; not of downright folly; but of a want of capacity, or inclination, for sober thought. This is not always the case: accidental circumstances almost force the taste upon people: but, generally ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... proceedings of a painter that serves me, I had a mind to imitate his way. He chooses the fairest place and middle of any wall, or panel, wherein to draw a picture, which he finishes with his utmost care and art, and the vacuity about it he fills with grotesques, which are odd fantastic figures without any grace but what they derive from their variety, and the extravagance of their shapes. And in truth, what are these things I scribble, other than grotesques ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... of soap. He never received so much as a street-car transfer without reading its entire face contents. In seven years he had not availed himself of the annual two weeks' vacation offered him by his firm, and, conspire as he would against it, Sunday continued to represent to him a hebdomadal vacuity of morning paper, afternoon nap and walk, unsatisfactory cold supper, and early to bed. His very capacity for monotony seemed to engender it. He could sit in Forest Park the whole of a Sunday afternoon, ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... become conscious during sleep, notwithstanding that all impressions of the senses were completely obliterated, as they are in deep sleep. Now would any memory remain to him of what had happened while he was awake. Would his soul find itself in a state of vacuity? Would it be incapable of having any experiences? This is a question that can only be answered if conditions like or similar to those under discussion can actually be brought about. If the soul is capable of experiencing anything, even when sense-activities and recollection of such activities ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner
... faithful reporter, and which habit had made as necessary to the Antiquary as his occasional pinch of snuff, although he held, or affected to hold, both to be of the same intrinsic value. The feeling of vacuity peculiar to such a deprivation, was alleviated by the appearance of old Ochiltree, sauntering beside the clipped yew and holly hedges, with the air of a person quite at home. Indeed, so familiar had he been of late, that even Juno did not bark ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... dismayed by the sound of bells pealing out the arrival of Pedrito Montero, Sotillo had spent the morning in battling with his thoughts; a contest to which he was unequal, from the vacuity of his mind and the violence of his passions. Disappointment, greed, anger, and fear made a tumult, in the colonel's breast louder than the din of bells in the town. Nothing he had planned had come to pass. Neither Sulaco ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... Luckenwarry; where there is good encampment and water, and the natives are principally Hindoos. Early on the following morning we began to cross the Luckenwarry Ghaut; the roads were steep and not above ten feet wide, and on each side a vacuity of about 250 feet deep. The light in the lantern being extinguished, and the moon being obscured, my horse, had it not been for the horse-keeper, would have precipitated me to the bottom; I instantly dismounted, ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to India; of a Shipwreck on board the Lady Castlereagh; and a Description of New South Wales • W. B. Cramp
... complex consciousness which has slowly evolved out of infantine vacuity—consciousness which, in other shapes, is manifested by animate beings at large—consciousness which, during the development of every creature, makes its appearance out of what seems unconscious matter; suggesting the thought that consciousness, ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... chiefly concerns us here is to note Schiller's awakening interest in historical studies. In the spring of 1786, during an absence of the Koerners which deprived him of his wonted inspiration, he found himself unable to work. Letter after letter tells of laziness and mental vacuity. As he could do nothing else he took to desultory reading, and this did not satisfy him. 'Really', he wrote on the 15th ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... too strong for utterance, and "My mother!" "My son!" were the only words that either could articulate. At length, raising his head, Colonel Lennox fixed his eyes on his mother's face with a gaze of deep and fearful inquiry; but no returning glance spoke there. With that mournful vacuity, peculiar to the blind, which is a thousand times more touching than all the varied expression of the living orb, she continued to regard the vacant space which imagination had filled with the image she ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... respond to his influence. They are attracted by his erotic will, not by one or the other of his spiritual or physical qualities. Women cannot resist a man to whom they mean much, everything. It is as if they were compelled to throw themselves into the chasm of his vacuity—every fresh victim with the fond hope of filling it—but all of them perish. And yet, at the moment of their defeat they are supremely happy, for they experience the full intensity of his passion and the boundlessness of his longing. The erotic craving ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... of lunches, dinners, balls, operas, theatres, card-parties, and inane jabber," he answered. "A mixture of various kinds of food which people eat recklessly with the natural results,—dyspepsia, inertia, mental vacuity, and general uselessness. A few Court 'functions,' some picture shows, and two or three great races—and—that's all. Some unfortunate marriages are usually the result of each ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... intercourse the speaker should let his soul beam from his eye. Nor should he fail to look at his hearers, if he would have his hearers look at him. Among the faults to be avoided in the management of the eye, Dr. Porter notices particularly that unmeaning look which the eye "bent on vacuity" has, resembling the inexpressive glare of the glass eye of a wax figure; that indefinite sweep of the eye which ranges from one side to the other of an assembly, resting nowhere; and that tremulous, roving cast of the eye, and ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... away from Princes Street to his own home now, and the decent grey vacuity of the streets soothed him. If he only had the sense to stay in the district of orderly houses where he belonged, and behaved accordingly, and did not go talking with people beneath him, he could not ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... connect their beloved daughters, there is no security for permanent happiness without real religion; and let children consider, that if the fear of God do not possess their own breasts, and influence their matrimonial choice, the delirium of pleasure will soon be past, and a sense of inexpressible vacuity be left behind. The world is a gay deceiver, and life a fleeting dream; the mists of illusion which gather over the morning of existence, gradually disappear as the day advances; and this imagined scene of enchantment, this fairy-land of pleasure subsides into the reality of a thorny wilderness. ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... results is part of the general history of religion and politics. In some respects it may have been premature; in many cases it seems (as might be expected) to have gone along with hardness and sterility of mind, and to have left an inheritance of vacuity behind it. The curious and elaborate hardness of the Icelandic Court poetry may possibly be a sign of this same temper; in another way, the prevalent coolness of Northern piety, even before the Reformation, is scarcely to be dissociated from the coolness of ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... kings, Cyrus and Xerxes, whose names burst upon us with dim light out of a black antiquity? Even they were but shadows on a screen, just seen and disappearing. What kings and kingdoms came before them and passed away? Has history no record? Not a word. Only black vacuity has been left behind them. And there was that other empire of the East, that of the Hittites, which we now know ruled Asia Minor and Syria and contested the rule of the world with Assyria and Egypt centuries before Agamemnon and Achilles, but so utterly buried and forgotten that ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... stalks the shadow of Eternal Death; through it too I look not 'up into the divine eye,' as Richter has it, 'but down into the bottomless eyesocket'—not up towards God, Heaven, and the Throne of Truth, but too truly down towards Falsity, Vacuity, and the ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... young girl ran a ceaseless paean of thanksgiving for her timely deliverance from the trammels which she so well knew enshackled these glittering birds of paradise. With it mingled a great, consuming desire, a soul-longing to pour into the vacuity of high society the leaven of her own pure thought. In particular did her boundless love now go out to that gigantic figure whose ideals of life this sumptuous display of material wealth and power expressed. Why was he doing this? What ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... elements In mutiny had from her axle torn The steadfast Earth. At last his sail-broad vans He spread for flight, and, in the surging smoke Uplifted, spurns the ground; thence many a league, As in a cloudy chair, ascending rides Audacious; but, that seat soon failing, meets A vast vacuity. All unawares, Fluttering his pennons vain, plumb-down he drops Ten thousand fathom deep, and to this hour Down had been falling, had not, by ill chance, The strong rebuff of some tumultuous cloud, Instinct with fire ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... as soon as I asked myself the question, and tried to discover some subjects to which I could impart a philosophical significance of infinite value, my mind would stop like a clock, I would see before me vacuity, nothing, would feel either that I was wholly devoid of talent, or that, perhaps, a malady of the brain was hindering its development. Sometimes I would depend upon my father's arranging everything for ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... of a suspension of judgment, extending till it fills heaven and earth. We no longer discuss opinions even; the most we can attain to is an attitude of mind. In view of the vast variety of phases in which even man's great ideas have been held, a sense of indifference among them, a vacuity in all, grows up. Pilate's question, 'What ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... "Tatler's" personality was Isaac Bickerstaff, Physician and Astrologer; as to years, just over the grand climacteric, sixty-three, mystical multiple of nine and seven; dispensing counsel from his lodgings at Shire Lane, and seeking occasional rest in the vacuity of thought proper to ...
— Isaac Bickerstaff • Richard Steele
... worth mentioning below Westminster. To the poets, the River becomes flat and songless where at Richmond the sea's remote influence just moves it; and there they leave it. The Thames goes down then to a wide grey vacuity, a featureless monotony where men but toil, where life becomes silent in effort, and goes out through fogs to nowhere in particular. But there is a hill-top at Woolwich from which, better than from Richmond, our River, the burden-bearer, ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... overtake him as to the captain's competency to navigate his ship. The ignoramus must have lost his way, and drifted into the outer confines of creation, the region of the everlasting lull, introductory to a positive vacuity. ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... sometimes I would draw away as though from something partly spectral. I had moments when I thought of him as of a man of pasteboard—as though, if one should strike smartly through the buckram of his countenance, there would be found a mere vacuity within. This horror (not merely fanciful, I think) vastly increased my detestation of his neighbourhood; I began to feel something shiver within me on his drawing near; I had at times a longing to cry out; there were days when I thought I could have struck ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sunlight—the extreme loveliness which the ideal conveys, and which by giving it life increases its attraction. With all these charms, a soul yearning to attach itself, a heart easily moved, but yet earnest in desire to fix itself; a pensive and intelligent smile, with nothing of vacuity in it, nothing of preference or mere acquaintanceship in it, because it felt itself worthy of friendships. Such ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... either the theory or the practice of art: but they had open eyes and minds, and could discern that some things were good and other bad—that some things they liked, and others they hated. They hated the lack of ideas in art, and the lack of character; the silliness and vacuity which belong to the one, the flimsiness and make-believe which result from the other. They hated those forms of execution which are merely smooth and prettyish, and those which, pretending to mastery, are nothing better than slovenly and slapdash, ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... more sympathy with it in the press if the real reason for the practice were understood, but it would be treated more respectfully. Some have said that the practice arises from nervousness—the idle desire to be busy without doing anything—and because it fills up the pauses of vacuity in conversation. But this would not fully account for the practice of it in solitude. Some have regarded it as in obedience to the feminine instinct for the cultivation of patience and self-denial —patience in a fruitless activity, and self-denial ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... digestive powers, and felt much inclined, when morning came, to satisfy the cravings of his appetite as usual; but Jacques drew such a graphic picture of the work that lay before him, that he forbore to urge the matter, and went off to walk with a light step, and an uncomfortable feeling of vacuity about the region ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... arms wildly round her neck, besought her to protect her. Mrs. Mowbray gazed anxiously upon the altered countenance of her daughter, but a few moments relieved her from much of her uneasiness.—The expression of pain gradually subsided, and the look of vacuity was succeeded by one of frenzied excitement. A film had, for an instant or two, dimmed her eyes; they now gleamed with unnatural lustre. She smiled—the smile was singular; it was not the playful, pleasurable lighting up of ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... was tangible. Contradiction retired into corners, only to be swept out of them. For this marriage, abominable to hear of, was of so wonderful a sort, that the story filled the mind, and the discrediting of the story threatened the great world's cranium with a vacuity yet ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... remoteness and the inherent desolation of Boston they could not suppress some sighs, and in the mean time Aunt Melissa stepped into the waiting-room, which opened on the farther side upon the water, and sat contentedly down on one of the benches; the rest, from sheer vacuity and irresolution, followed, and thus, without debate, it was settled that they should wait there till the boat left. The agent, who was a kind man, did what he could to alleviate the situation: he gave them each the advertisement of his line of boats, neatly printed upon a card, and ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... began to blow the covered fire on the hearth, where he had not long before "boiled his kettle" for his tea. Then closing the door, he lighted a candle, and Mary looking about her could scarcely believe the change that had come upon the miserable vacuity. Joseph sat down upon his anvil, and begged to know where she had just been, and how far she had run from the rascal. When he had learned something of the peculiar relations in which Mary stood to the family at Durnmelling, he began to think there might have been something more in the pursuit ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... man looked at him with a slightly puzzled air. There was a certain vacuity in his expression, for which one found ...
— The Lost Ambassador - The Search For The Missing Delora • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... worn away. At the age of three and a half or four years the next pair of nippers will be changed, and the mouth at that time cannot be mistaken. The central nippers will have nearly attained their full growth, and a vacuity will be left where the second stood; or, they will begin to peep above the gum, and the corner ones will be diminished in breadth and worn down, the mark becoming small and faint. At this period also the second pair ...
— The Mule - A Treatise On The Breeding, Training, - And Uses To Which He May Be Put • Harvey Riley
... a certain degree of weakness. No hollow building can be equally strong with a solid mass, of which every upper part presses perpendicularly upon the lower. Any weight laid upon the top of an arch, has a tendency to force that top into the vacuity below; and the arch, thus loaded on the top, stands only because the stones that form it, being wider in the upper than in the lower parts, that part that fills a wider space cannot fall through a space ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... create things, he ought not to have published his books on "Style" and on "Shakespere." He ought to have burnt them. For they are as hollow as a drum and as unoriginal as a bride-cake: nothing but vacuity with an icing of phrases. I am brought back again to the anecdote of the musician. No one who had the least glimmering of an individual vision of what style truly is could possibly have tolerated the too fearfully ingenious mess of words that Professor Raleigh courageously calls a ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett |
