"Emptiness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the sun, of course. The odds were infinitely against such a happening. It pounded past the sun, shrieking its news, and hurtled on out to the illimitable emptiness beyond. It was still squealing when it went ...
— A Matter of Importance • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... instil into the innocent youth, and fancies she sees in him again the Savior whom she had once laughed at. She tells him with heartrending truth her inextinguishable suffering, her eternal sorrow, her lamentation full of the laughter of derision, the whole wide emptiness of her misery, and implores him to be merciful, and let her weep for a single hour upon his pure bosom—for a single hour to be his. But the answer comes like the voice of an avenging God, ...
— Life of Wagner - Biographies of Musicians • Louis Nohl
... the door as they sallied forth into the bright sunlight, paused a moment to look after them admiringly, and then turned slowly back into the hotel, smiling softly to himself. He sauntered through the deserted vestibule, and its emptiness struck him as ...
— Affairs of State • Burton E. Stevenson
... it. The loneliness that had tired him so ever since his mother slipped away was no longer a sharp, never silent pain, a great emptiness, but rather a sweet sorrow that was ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... on one long leg in the door of his drug-store, oil on his fluffy brown hair. He was melancholy and downcast, plainly resentful in his bearing toward Morgan as the contriver of this business stagnation. He swept his hand around the emptiness of the town as Morgan drew near, giving voice ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... cold increased greatly; and its severity may be imagined, as birds were found on the ground frozen stiff with the cold. Soldiers who had seated themselves with their head in their hands, and bodies bent forward in order to thus feel less the emptiness of their stomachs, were found dead in this position. As we breathed, the vapor from our lips froze on our eyebrows, little white icicles formed on the mustaches and beards of the soldiers; and in order to melt them they warmed their chins by the bivouac fire, and as ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... before had he felt so keenly the impotence of mortal man and the futility of worldly strivings. Never had he seen so clearly the fatal defects in the accepted interpretation of Christ's mission on earth. His earlier questionings returned in violent protests against the emptiness of the beliefs and formalities of the Church. In times past he had voiced vague and dimly outlined perceptions of her spiritual needs. But now to him these needs had suddenly taken definite form. Jesus had healed the sick of all manner of disease. He himself ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... tortures dragged him to the grave. And then her little daughter was taken from her. Maria watched at the couch of suffering and death with maternal anguish. The glowing heart of a mother throbbed within the bosom of Maria. The heartlessness and emptiness of all other pursuits had but given intensity to the fervor of a mother's love. Though but twenty-three years of age, she had drained every cup of pleasure to its dregs. And now she began to enter upon a path every year more dark, dreary, ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... live and toil there without contracting a probably diseased habit of body; without contracting a certainly dull, weary, sordid habit of mind, which craves for any pleasure, however brutal, to escape from its own stupidity and emptiness? When I run through, by rail, certain parts of the iron-producing country—streets of furnaces, collieries, slag heaps, mud, slop, brick house-rows, smoke, dirt— and that is all; and when I am told, whether truly or falsely, that the main thing which the well-paid and well-fed men ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... out of hell by my private trap, and now write to you from my little place in purgatory. But I prefer hell: would I could always dig in those red coals—or else be at sea in a schooner, bound for isles unvisited: to be on shore and not to work is emptiness—suicidal vacancy. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... there the worship of Our Lady, to incite a spirit of pilgrimage thither; but all is dead! That Cathedral no longer has a soul; it is an inert corpse of stone; try attending Mass there, try to approach the Holy Table—you will feel an icy cloak fall on you and crush you. Is it the result of its emptiness, of its torpid services, of the froth of runs and trills they send up there, of its being closed in a hurry in the evening and never open till so late in the morning, long after daybreak? Or has it something to do with the permitted ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... pay a second visit to the host, who is still busy digesting the President's Message. Obviously, the longer he has it under consideration, the worse he finds it. He has nausea from its bragging, his head aches with its loudness, and its emptiness fills him with wind. We are at our wits' end to prescribe for him, and take our leave with grave commiseration, telling him that we, too, have had it, but that the symptoms it produces in the North ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... homewards with the dervish. Ample stores of all necessaries for her accommodation had been laid in, and slaves male and female were left for her attendance and protection. Not many days, had elapsed when an incident occurred, clearly proving the emptiness of human caution against the predestination of fate. The prince of Eerauk being upon a hunting excursion outrode his attendants, and missing his way, reached the gate of the cavern leading to the mansion, which was guarded by two black slaves, ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 4 • Anon.
... was that way. She was in the seat beside him. Every dear, every sweet, every luscious, lovely memory of her was there ... and behind him, just out of eye-corner visibility, were the three kids. And a whole lifetime of this loomed ahead—a vista of emptiness more vacuous far than the emptiest reaches of intergalactic space. Damnation! He couldn't stand much ...
— The Vortex Blaster • Edward Elmer Smith
... and walked aimlessly along the ridge above the quarry. The bright emptiness below was grotesque with shadow, shadows of ghost-like derricks, screens and drills. On the spur track lay a car half full of stone. Standing there with the trainload of Donald's labor at his feet, it came sharply to Brian that the boy stood ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... — N. absence; inexistence &c 2 [Obs.]; nonresidence, absenteeism; nonattendance, alibi. emptiness &c adj.; void, vacuum; vacuity, vacancy; tabula rasa [Lat.]; exemption; hiatus &c (interval) 198; lipotype^. truant, absentee. nobody; nobody present, nobody on earth; not a soul; ame qui vive [Fr.]. V. be absent &c adj.; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... richness of their uniform, and the insolence of their manners. It was the day of boasts and pomps. All forms and emblems had their ancient force. All men partook of the vices and follies which were praised. In their levity and delusion, they did not see the real emptiness and hollowness of their institutions. A blinded generation never can see the signs of the times. Only a few contemplative men hid themselves in retired places, but were denounced as croakers or evil minded. Every body was interested in keeping up the delusion. Panics seldom last long. ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... coquettish nature of the weather, we gave it up. Not a bird to be seen—we took our bottles, and throwing our heads back on our shoulders, tried to look through the bottoms of them—they in turn gave out a gurgling sound of complaining emptiness. We fell into a refreshing sleep; the hours passed away unheeded, until we were awakened by the rustling of the reeds bending in the breeze, whispering of the coveted blow. Heavy black clouds were gathering, and soon old Boreas came ...
— Nick Baba's Last Drink and Other Sketches • George P. Goff
... sacred art; a dullness not merely baneful in making religion distasteful to the young, but in sickening, as we have seen, all vital belief of religion in the old. A dim sense of impossibility attaches itself always to the graceful emptiness of the representation; we feel instinctively that the painted Christ and painted apostle are not beings that ever did or could exist; and this fatal sense of fair fabulousness, and well-composed impossibility, steals gradually from the picture into the history, ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... evidence, however, to show that K[o]b[o] did more than arrange in order forty-seven of the easiest Chinese signs then used, in such a manner that they conveyed in a few lines of doggerel the sense of a passage from a sutra in which the mortality of man and the emptiness of all things are taught, and the doctrine of Nirvana is suggested.[14] Hokusai, the artist, in a sketch which embodies the popular idea of this bonze's immense industry, represents him copying the shastras and sutras. K[o]b[o] is on a seat before a large ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... that night in the hospital, he went over them carefully. And even their magnitude, while it alarmed him, brought no protest from him. After all the mill and the new plant were his toys to play with. He found there something to fill up the emptiness of his life. If a great house was Natalie's ambition, if it gave her pleasure and something to live for, she ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... one day that I was ashore in the cove, with Mrs. Stevenson and the ship's cook. Except for the Casco lying outside, and a crane or two, and the ever-busy wind and sea, the face of the world was of a prehistoric emptiness; life appeared to stand stock- still, and the sense of isolation was profound and refreshing. On a sudden, the trade-wind, coming in a gust over the isthmus, struck and scattered the fans of the palms above the den; and, behold! in two of the tops there sat a native, ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... specifically dramatic than the Screen Scene in The School for Scandal; yet it would be the veriest quibbling to argue that any appreciable part of its effect arises from the clash of will against will. This whole comedy, indeed, suffices to show the emptiness of the theory. With a little strain it is possible to bring it within the letter of the formula; but who can pretend that any considerable part of the attraction or interest of the play ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... long, hot climb out of the valley to a hill where she could see very far again, but still that vast emptiness reigned. Even the eagle had disappeared, and she fancied he must be resting like a great emblem of freedom on one of the points of the castle-like battlement against the sky. It seemed as if the end of the world had come, and she was the ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... creatures, and devotion to the infinite truth of love; the other, which is called the Mahayana, had its origin in the positive element contained in Buddha's teachings, which is immeasurable love. It could never, by any logic, find its reality in the emptiness of the truthless abyss. And the object of Buddha's meditation and his teachings was to free humanity from sufferings. But what was the path that he revealed to us? Was it some negative way of evading pain and seeking security against it? On the contrary, his path was the path of sacrifice—the ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... is a characteristic doctrine of the Utilitarian school. We are under an 'obligation' so far as we are affected by a 'sanction.' It appeared to Bentham so obvious as to need no demonstration, only an exposition of the emptiness of any verbal contradiction. Such metaphysical basis as he needed is simply the attempt to express the corresponding conception of reality which, in his opinion, only requires to be ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... his introductions over, looked curiously round the room, studied its stately emptiness, the books on the walls under a trellis-work, faintly gilt, the three fine pictures; then his eyes passed to the tall and slender lady who had addressed him in such perfect French, and to the little Duchess in her flutter of lace ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... and that sweet disorder which is the truest order. Chairs at the right angles, tables convenient, but never in the way. A roaring wood fire on a dustless hearth; pictures hung neither too high nor too low, and no sense of emptiness nor crowding. A room that neither compelled attention, nor irritated the nerves—a place to rest in, love in, and go out from, with ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... and other articles of feminine apparel it contained flung out on the floor. There was no other hiding-place possible, except beneath the bed, and the ruthless hand of the inspector had torn off the white muslin bed hangings, revealing emptiness underneath. Rolfe went out into the hall again, and entered the room next the bedroom. This apartment was apparently used as a dining-room, for it contained a large table, a few chairs, a small sideboard, a spirit-stand, a case of books and ornaments, and two small ...
— The Hampstead Mystery • John R. Watson
... fingers. Well, this was the end. She was to be thrust out of the new brightness, back into the drab dreariness, the emptiness that was her fate. She ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... a friend upon whom the heart was fixed, to whom every wish and endeavour tended, is a state of dreary desolation, in which the mind looks abroad impatient of itself, and finds nothing but emptiness and horrour. The blameless life, the artless tenderness, the pious simplicity, the modest resignation, the patient sickness, and the quiet death, are remembered only to add value to the loss, to aggravate regret for what cannot be amended, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... questioned for reply. "Don't you ever get weary with the emptiness of it all, the everlasting round, the dullness? Don't you ever want to get away from Deal, and know people and see things and ...
— The Inn at the Red Oak • Latta Griswold
... divine, and watched the girlish figure as if it were a symbol of their early aspirations dawning freshly from the dimness of their past. More than one old man thought again of some little maid whose love made his boyish days a pleasant memory to him now. More than one smiling fop felt the emptiness of his smooth speech, when the truthful eyes looked up into his own; and more than one pale woman sighed regretfully with herself, "I, too, was ...
— A Modern Cinderella - or The Little Old Show and Other Stories • Louisa May Alcott
... off, and the next thing I heard she'd taken to her heels and Philander drifted here to the mines. I knew he needed me more than ever—he was a dreadful creature about doing for himself, not eating at Christian hours, just waiting till he keeled over from emptiness, so I came logging along after him and—stayed. He was considerable upset when he saw me and he never got to, what you might say, speaking to me, but he was near and he ate the food I left on his steps and he washed the plates and cups and that ...
— At the Crossroads • Harriet T. Comstock
... his purse to a state of emptiness. His last guinea was gone, and two months were wanting to the end of the quarter. George had played and been cheated. He had ventured to apply to his mother for small sums, when his dress or some trifling indulgence required an advance; and always with success. But here were ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... criticism on the young generation. In all the contemporaneous questions, intellectual movements, debates and ideals with which the young generation is occupied, Turgenev finds not the least common sense and gives us to understand that they lead only to demoralisation, emptiness, prosaic shallowness, and cynicism. Turgenev finds his ideal in quite a different place, namely in the 'fathers,' in the more or less old generation. Consequently, he draws a parallel and contrast between the 'fathers' and the 'children,' ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... Suffolk's invasion till late in the year. They were increased by the emptiness of Henry's treasury. His father's hoard had melted away, and it was absolutely necessary to obtain lavish supplies from Parliament. But Parliament proved ominously intractable. Thomas Cromwell, now rising to notice, in a temperate speech urged the folly of indulging in impracticable ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... she had; so it amounted to the same thing as far as the argument went. Julia knew in her own heart that the only thing that held her to the dreary old house with its sad memories and its haunting emptiness was the fact that it was hers and that here she could be independent and do as she pleased. If she pleased to starve, no one else need know it. The big ache that was in her heart was the fact that there was nobody really to care if she did starve. Even Ellen's solicitations were largely from ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... But how all the beauty of the singing morning became a scentless flower when, on making the earliest possible call, he was met at the door with that hollow word, 'Away'—a word that seemed to echo through long rooms of infinite emptiness and turn the daylight shabby—till the addendum, 'for the day,' set the birds singing again, and ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... to the big lamp and turned up the wick. At once a clear light flooded every nook of the big room and showed all its emptiness. ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... Martin was nosing about alone. He, like a hungry thing of the wilds, had found his foe's trail and meant to bag him unaided and have full vengeance and glory. But so unexpectedly, and alarmingly unconcerned, did Burke materialize in the emptiness that Jed's gun was a minute too late in getting into position. Lawson had the drop on him! They were both very quiet for a moment, then Lawson laughed and did it so boldly that ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock
... appearance of the widowed Queen was at the opening of Parliament, in 1866. I do not know whether the splendid chair of State she had provided for Prince Albert, in the happy old time, had been left in its place, to smite her eyes with its gilding and her heart with its emptiness; I do not know whether its presence or its absence would have grieved her most; but every sorrowing widow knows what it is to look on her husband's vacant chair. It does not matter whether it is made of rude, unpainted wood and woven rushes, or is a golden and velvet- cushioned chair of State,—it ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... to me an insupportable torment. That I might not live like a savage, I took it into my head to learn to make laces. Like the women, I carried my cushion with me, when I went to make visits, or sat down to work at my door, and chatted with passers-by. This made me the better support the emptiness of babbling, and enabled me to pass my time with my female neighbors without weariness. Several of these were very amiable and not devoid of wit. One in particular, Isabella d'Ivernois, daughter of the attorney-general of Neuchatel, ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... Church of the Capuchins, in Vienna, a monk lights with a flickering torch the dark tomb of the great captain's son, who lies by the side of his grandfather, Francis II., who was at once his protector and his jailer, deep thoughts arise as one considers the vanity of political calculations, the emptiness of glory, of power, and ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... familiar objects. Those flatirons intermittently pulled her eyes round. Her fancy played tricks with her whenever her glance touched the window. Faces peering in. In a burst of impatience she dropped the dish towel, hurried to the window, and threw it up. Black emptiness!... Cutty, crossing the platform with Hawksley on his shoulders. She saw that, and ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... effect to prevent the Northern apologist for slavery from repeating the remark that the South would gladly liberate her slaves, if she saw any prospect of bettering the condition of the objects of her tender and solicitous benevolence. I trust, too, that this admission will go far to prove the emptiness of your declaration, that the abolitionists "have thrown back for half a century the prospect of any species of emancipation of the African race, gradual or immediate, in any of the states," and the emptiness of your declaration, that, "prior to the agitation of this subject of abolition, there ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... noontime. Ere noontime came I was consumed with gnawing pains of emptiness. As nearly as I might judge, I contained naught save vast hollow spaces and acoustics and vacuums and empty, echoing, neglected convolutions. Sorely was I tempted to relax the rigors of the just-inaugurated regime; nobly, though, I resisted ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb
... when the workmen had all gone and the house was left to emptiness and echoes, and the old housekeeper had gathered up her rheumatic limbs into her bed, and my little room in quite another part of the house had been set ready, how reluctantly I used to leave the friendly frogs and owls, and with my heart somewhere down in my shoes lock the door to the ...
— Elizabeth and her German Garden • "Elizabeth", AKA Marie Annette Beauchamp
... debt. I found the place in a wretched condition, and, in order to oversee its management to any advantage, I resolved to transfer my business in the mission to an agent, and move on the place with my wife. Then came a fatal hour for me. Into my darkened soul, into the comfortless, emptiness of my life, entered the ...
— Sister Carmen • M. Corvus
... a man guilty of no other offence, as they knew, than that he had been offered a sum of Spanish money, which he denied he would have accepted, and certainly never received. Most shameful of all was the conduct of the Government which knew the emptiness of the entire case, yet strained every nerve ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... is extensive, and in its expansion corresponds to the widespread demand for real information and advice to the salesman. But hardly any part of the literature in the borderland regions of economics is so disappointing in its vagueness, emptiness, and helplessness. Experimental psychology has nothing with which to replace it to-day, but it can at least show the direction from which decisive help may be expected ...
— Psychology and Industrial Efficiency • Hugo Muensterberg
... the empty bed. The coverings had been thrown back, and Louise's pink silk dressing-gown was gone from the foot, where it had lain. The night lamp burned dimly, revealing the emptiness of the place. I picked it up, but my hand shook so that I put it down again, and got ...
— The Circular Staircase • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... round by the warehouse lane into the street, waiting at the door while his friend went through the old building, carefully putting up the bars and locking the street door upon its emptiness with a ponderous key; then the two captains walked away together, the tall one and the short one, clicking their canes on the flagstones. They turned up Barbadoes Street, where Mrs. Lunn lived, and bowed to her finely as ...
— The Life of Nancy • Sarah Orne Jewett
... training, without experience, without definite knowledge of the need to be met, with only a strong desire and a mixed ideal, and almost without his own volition, he found himself now sitting at a desk in West Tenth Street, with two employees, and nothing to do. How out of this emptiness was he to create ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... our own day, Alice Morse Earle, has well expressed our opinion when she says in her Child Life in Colonial Days: "The terrible verses telling of God's judgment on the land, of fear of the pit, of the snare, of emptiness and waste, of destruction and desolation, must have sunk deep into the heart of the sick child, and produced the condition shown by this entry when she was a few years older: 'When I came in, past 7 at night, my wife met me in the Entry and told ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... grey; there was a feeling of rain in the air. To my amazement, I found no one under the oak; I walked several times round it, went up to the edge of the wood, turned back again, peered anxiously into the darkness.... All was emptiness. I waited a little, then several times I uttered the name, Alice, each time a little louder,... but she did not appear. I felt sad, almost sick at heart; my previous apprehensions vanished; I could not resign myself to the idea that my companion ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... explanation and lectures vanished, for the Candidate had entirely renounced his dissipated friends and companions, and now nobody could talk more edifying than he on the subject. He agreed so cordially with Elise, that the fleeting champagne of the orgies foamed only for the moment, leaving nothing but emptiness and flatness behind. "For once, nay, for a few times," he was of opinion, "such excesses might be harmless, perhaps even refreshing; but often repeated—ah! that would be prejudicial, and demoralising in ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... walk among the bulkheads on the roof, and watch the blue deception of the lake. Perhaps, if the wind comes booming in, I hear the awakening roar in the streets and think of work. Perhaps the clear emptiness of a Sunday hovers over the shore; then I wonder what you will say to this letter. Will you feel with me that you should live on a housetop and eat cheese? Do you long for a cool stream without flies, and a carpet of golden sand? Do you want a coal fire and a husband home ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... a love which seems to have puzzled his contemporaries and some of his subsequent biographers. The man with the passionate nature, who cried in his youth for the satisfaction of his two immense desires—to be celebrated and to be loved—soon found the emptiness of the life of fame alone; and Madame Hanska, dowered with all that he longed for, came into his life at the psychological moment when he had broken with the old love, born into the world too soon, and had suffered bitterly at the cruel hands of the new. He turned to her with ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... see the emptiness Of all this world contains; And here we feel the blessedness That for us ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... sold for and to the world and a good nun made for the service of other things. Sister Ursula's voice was very sweet, but the matter of her speech did not interest. The invalid lay still, looking out of the window upon the street all dressed in its Sunday afternoon emptiness. Then he shut his eyes. The doctor's boy rang at the door. Sister Ursula stepped out into the hall, not to disturb the sleeper, and took the medicine from the boy's hand. Then the lift shot down again, and ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... which told her that it lived, she might have thought herself enfolded in the hills. So sure she was that she had been wedded, she glanced swiftly up and down the street, lest one chance passenger should have seen her naked soul. So a young girl, kissed by her lover, will search the emptiness in fear. Not a soul could be seen; Charles Street under its lamplight showed like a broad white ribbon curving towards the Square, towards the Park. To her heart she whispered, "Dearest, you may love me—we are alone under the stars"— ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... offer up the stranger's evening prayer. My body shakes with weeping as I pray, Thinking on all I love that are not there, So desolately absent far away— My Love and Friend, and my own land and home. O aching emptiness of evening skies! O foolish heart, what tempted thee to roam So far away from the Beloved's eyes! To the Beloved's country I belong— I am a stranger in this foreign place; Strange are its streets, and strange ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... in recognising his style, and manner, and sentiments in those papers which are now published under his name. They may be considered as a continuation of the Rambler. The same subjects are discussed; the interests of literature and of literary men, the emptiness of praise and the vanity of human wishes. The same intimate knowledge, of the town and its manners is displayed[3]; and occasionally we are amused with humorous delineation of adventure and ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... without words to understand the indications of coarse and disagreeable natures in whose neighbourhood she disliked to find herself of whose neighbourhood she exceedingly disliked to be reminded. The muttered oath, the more than muttered jest, the various laughs that tell so much of head or heart emptiness the shadowy but sure tokens of that in human nature which one would not realize, and which one strives to forget; Fleda shrank within herself, and would gladly have stopped her ears; did sometimes covertly. Oh, if home could be but reached, and she out ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell
... highest privilege of their life, a joy and a blessing. Bring back all who are discouraged, because they cannot find aught to bring Thee in prayer. O give them to understand that they have only to come with their emptiness to Him who has all to give, and delights to do it. Not, what they have to bring the Father, but what the Father waits to give ...
— Lord, Teach Us To Pray • Andrew Murray
... over the barren top of the dresser. It would not cover it all, of course; but it made an island in a sea of emptiness. ...
— Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp - or, The Old Lumberman's Secret • Annie Roe Carr
... which we knew before into a huge fantastic contradictory system, which hides its nakedness and emptiness partly under the veil of an imposing terminology, and partly in the primeval fog."—"His contributions are of a depth, profundity, and magnitude which have no parallel in the history of mind. Taking but one—and one only—of his transcendent reaches of thought,—namely, that ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... void of fruition and dissipated into emptiness, his fondest hopes and ambitions crumbled and scattered, shunned as a fanatic, and unable to longer wage life's battle, Hinton Rowan Helper, at one time United States consul general to Buenos Ayres, yesterday sought the darkest egress from his ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... that explosive charges would propel a rocket or space ship more effectively in the (theoretical) emptiness of space, than in our atmosphere. But to my mind it is quite possible that an explosion—a violent expansion of gases causing rapid increase of pressures—would be ineffectual where there are no pressures ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... got back to his rooms, he felt a sensation that had sometimes come upon him after a long day's hunting, a feeling of deadly fatigue and stifling emptiness, as if the rest of his body were drained of the blood that choked his heart. He opened his travelling-bag, took out a large silver flask, looked at it, sighed, shuddered slightly, poured about two tablespoonfuls of brandy down his throat; and then, with a gesture of ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... arms which were in the hands of the independent uniformed militia, and the arsenal was simply an empty storehouse. It did not take long to complete our inspection. At the door, as we were leaving the building, McClellan turned, and looking back into its emptiness, remarked, half humorously and half sadly, "A fine stock of munitions on which to begin a great war!" We went back to the State House, where a room in the Secretary of State's department was assigned us, and we sat ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... read again. What was Betty doing—what was she thinking now? She laid her book down in her lap, and covering her face with her hands, breathed a desperate little prayer. That life should be pain and emptiness to herself, seemed somehow natural since she had married Nigel—but pain and emptiness for Betty—No! No! No! Not for Betty! Piteous sorrow poured upon her like a flood. She did not know how the time passed. She sat, huddled ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... air, may be accustomed to take more food than is necessary. The useless excess is removed from the system by the waste outlets, as the skin, lungs, liver, kidneys, &c. In such cases, if food is not taken in the usual quantity, there will be a feeling of emptiness, if not of hunger, from the want of the usual distention of the stomach. This condition of the digestive organs may be the result of disease, but it is more frequently produced by inordinate daily indulgence in eating, amounting almost ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... this case the mnemonic image becomes transformed into a kind of present emotional possession, an element of that idealized and sublimated portion of our experience with which all imaginative persons fill up the emptiness of their actual lives, and to which the poet is wont to give an objective embodiment ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... willow tree. His eyes were still upon it, he was still regarding it at long range, through the shack door, getting the foreshorten of it, getting the middle distance, getting the perspective, utterly unable to stop his ceaseless staring into the emptiness of it, stop wondering what next and ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... Others were infected by the successful outlawry and there were some moments of swaying and striving before the crowd adjusted itself to its self-protective solidity. Emerged upon the broader stairs they ascended panting and scurrying, in a wild stampede, to the sudden quiet and chill and emptiness of the familiar hall, with its high-ranged plaster cupids, whose cheeks and breasts and thighs were thrown comically into relief by a thick coating of dust. Here a permanent fog seemed to hang under the roof; only a few lights twinkled frugally; and the querulous voice of the ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... great many seats yet further back—and all empty: a little raised, seeming to push themselves forward with the staring vacuity of an idiot: more seats overhead in a curving balcony, rising above each other as though proud of their emptiness. It would have been impossible to believe that mere vacant places could wear so sinister, as well as foolish, an aspect. An idiot, but a cruel idiot, too: the whole thing one cruel idiot, of the sort that likes to ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... smiling eyes. As always, in the aimless din and multiplicity of streets he felt himself most securely at home. The smear of gestures, the elastic distortion of crowds winding and unwinding under the tumult of windows, gave him the feeling of a geometrical emptiness of life. ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... coat sleeves to prove he was concealing nothing, he would take a large sheet of white paper, and with a swift movement twirl it round into a cornucopia. This was, of course, empty, and shaking it about to prove its emptiness, he then held it upright, and invited Dolly to look into it. But he held it so high, that she had to stand on tiptoe to peep in. However, she caught a glimpse, and it seemed to her there were pink flowers ...
— Two Little Women • Carolyn Wells
... thickets, but it was not dry. Water ran through there somewhere. Jean drew easier breath. All sounds except the rustling of birds or mice in the willows had ceased. The brake was pervaded by a dreamy emptiness. Jean decided to steal on a little farther, then wait till he felt he might ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... led the way with a pronunciamento declaring that "the absurd vaporings of the modern Nostradamus of New York" had now demonstrated their own emptiness. ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... by such a tribunal as the Star-chamber, where those who inflicted the punishment reaped the gain, and sat, like famished birds of prey, with keen eyes and bended talons, eager to supply for a moment by some wretch's ruin, the craving emptiness of the exchequer, this scheme of enormous penalties, became more dangerous and subversive of justice, though not ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... a grassy swish and deadened tread over the turf breaking stillness, we journeyed northward. Occasionally, like the chirp of cricket in a dry well, life sounded through emptiness. Skulking coyotes, seeking prey among earth mounds, or night hawks, lilting solitarily in vaulted mid-heaven, uttered cries that pierced the vast blue. Owls flapped stupidly up from our horses' feet. Hungry kites wheeled above lonely Indian graves, or perched on the scaffolding, ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... of a cricket, or feel the sun or wind or rain on my face. The book itself may spoil the pleasure it was designed to give me, and instead of satisfying my hunger, increase it until the craving and sensation of emptiness becomes intolerable. Not any day spent in a library would I live again, but rather some lurid day of labour and anxiety, of strife, or peril, ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... The old order had passed away, and no new order had, as yet, effectively disclosed itself. He had not formulated all this, or even consciously recognised the modification of his own attitude. Nevertheless he felt the gnawing ache of inward emptiness. It effectually broke up the torpor which had held him. It made him very restless. It reawoke in him an inclination ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... rode to the Country, and what did she find there? Just a lot of emptiness, with flowers everywhere. The birds were screaming overhead, the sun was on her face, The fences were untidy, and ...
— England over Seas • Lloyd Roberts
... wonder of the light," continued Uncle Andy, graciously pretending not to hear the interruption, "nothing stirred in all that emptiness of naked space. Of life there was not the least sign anywhere. This appeared the very home of death and intolerable cold. Yet at one spot, between two little, almost indistinguishable ridges of snow, might have been noticed a tiny wisp of vapor. If one had ...
— Children of the Wild • Charles G. D. Roberts
... apart from the rude shocks of war; lines were confused, old ideals were analyzed in many instances as hoary conventions, which had decayed inside until a succession of sharp quick contacts caused the shell to cave in upon emptiness. ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... days went on, the emptiness in the house became to him like that of the grave, and he learned presently that the peevish and exacting old lady who had not stirred for years from her sick-bed had left a vacancy larger than all the rest of them could fill. Cynthia, who had borne most of the burden, ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... the scene of solitude and emptiness, I was inexpressibly affected, even by recollecting those whom, when alive, I had no reason to regard with affection. But the thought that so many youths of goodly presence, warm with life, health, ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... I should not have been so selfish. But—but you cannot tell how I have suffered—all through the night-time, thinking and thinking—and saying to myself that surely you could not be going away from me—and in the morning, oh! the emptiness of all the sea and the sky, and you not there to be asked whether you would go out to Colonsay, or round to Loch Scridain, or go to see the rock-pigeons fly out of the caves. It is not a long time since you were with us Gerty; but to ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... modern operas, it stands in its dignified simplicity like the Parthenon beside the bewildering beauty of a Gothic cathedral; and its truth and grandeur are perhaps the more conspicuous because allied to one of those classic stories which even in Gluck's time had become almost synonymous with emptiness and formality. ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... and opened it. She looked down the passage, then, satisfied as to its emptiness, ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... and delightful sense of emptiness which I felt in my chest extended to my limbs, which, in their turn, became light, as light as if the flesh and the bones had been melted and the skin only were left, the skin necessary to enable me to realize the sweetness of living, of bathing in this well-being. Then I perceived that ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... affection of men, but at the same time the weakness of character which makes them fatal to themselves and to their friends. To a man of that type, even without the incentive of the spirit of the time, no amount of money could be enough. It is hardly possible to doubt that the emptiness of his political title troubled the mind of the young Henry far less than the emptiness of ...
— The History of England From the Norman Conquest - to the Death of John (1066-1216) • George Burton Adams
... freedom and love, her heart was very warm with gratitude to this man who was helping her. But she could not guess, how could she, how in spite of the laughter on his lips there was a great ache and a feeling of emptiness ...
— The Imaginary Marriage • Henry St. John Cooper
... read him, we can feel From time to time the vigor of his name Against us like a finger for the shame And emptiness of what our souls reveal In books that are as altars where we kneel To consecrate the flicker, ...
— The Children of the Night • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... suddenly seized with immoderate laughter not untinctured with hysteria, loud and full of emptiness, as if she were shouting for echoes in ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... the forenoon of a bitter winter's day. The town of Eastport, in the state of Maine, lay buried under a deep snow that was newly fallen. The customary bustle in the streets was wanting. One could look long distances down them and see nothing but a dead-white emptiness, with silence to match. Of course I do not mean that you could see the silence—no, you could only ...
— Quotations from the Works of Mark Twain • David Widger
... of Sakti, the breath or power of a conscious deity, the theists would say; the eternal energy of an eternal, unconscious Law, say the Buddhists. Space, then, or "Fan, Bar-nang" (Maha Sunyata) or, as it is called by Lao-tze, the "Emptiness," is the nature of the Buddhist Absolute. (See Confucius' "Praise of the Abyss.") The word jiva, then, could never be applied by the Arahats to the Seventh Principle, since it is only through its correlation or contact ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... kaleidoscopic effect fell apart and resolved itself into light groups against the dark foliage or flashing masses of carriages and people and horses, and then even the blurs on the distance were gone, and the place was still and the wedding was over. The long afternoon was before them, with its restless emptiness, as if the bride and groom had taken all the reason ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... is nothing in this room but what ought to be in mine. Do you expect me to stand discussing superstition in this horrible raw emptiness? Here,' picking up Theodore, 'I'll come ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... fell to talking to amuse her, for he saw the emptiness behind the big blue eyes, the aching void which there was nothing to fill, neither love ...
— Tharon of Lost Valley • Vingie E. Roe
... eleven—the theatres just lettin' out, crowds going up and down and pouring into restaurants. Say, ain't it queer the difference in people's lives? There's them sitting on plush and eating lobster, and here's me looking into emptiness and half expecting to see a Yaqui grinning at me from behind a ...
— Across the Mesa • Jarvis Hall
... is your emptiness exposed. Because of your long length and the great sword you carry and the angle at which you cock your hat, people have gone in fear of you, have believed in you, have imagined you to be as terrible and as formidable as you insolently make yourself ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... power. The strength of your wealth at this moment is only an empty shell. That is why you are crying out your feeble little battle-cry, 'Return to the ways of our fathers.' You are aware of your impotency. You know that your strength is an empty shell. And I'll show you the emptiness ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... sound hollowly in the back rooms, and shafts of dusky light, preceded by hammerings and thumpings, began presently to band the inside of the house. Felicia stepped upon the painted floor of the bare hall, glanced up the narrow stairs, and then stood in the musty, half-lit emptiness of what she guessed to be the living-room, waiting for Ken. Kirk did not explore. He stood quite still beside his sister, sorting out sounds, analyzing smells. Ken came in, very dusty, rubbing his hands ...
— The Happy Venture • Edith Ballinger Price
... in secret, I have had ample punishment. This is no time to question whether my love be true or not; my life's work awaits me. Though my heart must henceforth enclose a red flame vainly striving to devour emptiness, still I must go back to that Paradise which will nevermore be Paradise to me. I owe the Gods a new divinity, hard won by my studies, before I may think of happiness. Forgive me, Devayani, and know that my suffering is doubled by the pain ...
— The Fugitive • Rabindranath Tagore
... character, and must habitually look upon the necessity of freedom as the absolute measure of his actions. (3) He must become religious; i.e. he must discern that the world, with all its changes, himself included, is only phenomenal; the affirmative side of this insight into the emptiness of the finite and transitory, which man would so willingly make everlasting, is the consciousness of the absolute existing in and for itself, which, in its certainty of its truth, not torn asunder through the ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... any other name for it? You could no longer bear the emptiness of your house. You were on the look-out ...
— The Lady From The Sea • Henrik Ibsen
... years would be all the same; if you could span the hour, you could span the million years. And if you could go back the million years, it was within your power to go back to the first tick of eternity, the first stir of time across the face of emptiness and nothingness—back to that initial instant when nothing as yet had happened or been planned or thought, when all the vastness of the Universe was a new slate waiting the first chalk ...
— Project Mastodon • Clifford Donald Simak
... virtually this question: How have ye treated us; how have ye taught us, fed us, and led us, while we toiled for you? The answer can be read in flames, over the nightly summer sky. This is the feeding and leading we have had of you: EMPTINESS,—of pocket, of stomach, of head, and of heart. Behold there is nothing in us; nothing but what Nature gives her wild children of the desert: Ferocity and Appetite; Strength grounded on Hunger. Did ye mark ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... understand it, but I am aware of something, either at the back of my head or behind me, which says, 'All this is futile stuff and nonsense: give it up, it's not for you; you are condemned to everlasting emptiness, and your life will never know any more ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... impression gathered strength. So she came out onto the road and trotted her cow-pony slowly under the beautiful branches of the silver spruce, and saw the bright tree shadows reflected in Bear Creek. Surely here was a place of infinite quiet, made for happiness. A peculiar ache and sense of emptiness entered her heart, and the ghost of Terry Hollis galloped soundlessly beside her on flaming El Sangre through the shadow. It seemed to her that she could understand him more easily. His had been a sheltered and pleasant life here, half dreamy; and when he wakened into a world of ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... day the Skylark plunged through the vast emptiness of the interstellar reaches. At the end of each second she was traveling exactly twenty-six feet per second faster than she had been at its beginning; and as day after day passed, her velocity mounted into figures which became meaningless, even when expressed in thousands of miles per second. ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... arguments. They have been pitied as insane, avoided as cynical, or passed over as frivolous. And yet, but for one reason, to that whole European world whose progress we are now inheriting, this view would have seemed not only not untenable, but even obvious. The emptiness of the things of this life, the incompleteness of even its highest pleasures, and their utter powerlessness to make us really happy, has been, at least for fifteen hundred years, a commonplace, both with saints and sages. The conception ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... emptiness: The sunlight falls On faded journals papering the walls; On advertisement chromos, torn with time, Around a hearth where wasps and spiders build.— The house is dead: meseems that night of crime It, too, was shot ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... world, how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable! What was his life? An emptiness. Himself? A shuttlecock, the helpless sport of his own failings, a vain thing alternately strutting and stumbling, now swaggering in the guise of an avenger self-appointed, now sneaking in the shameful habiliments of a ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... the most marked features of these lectures is the deep feeling which the preacher had of the emptiness and hollowness of the conventional religionism of the day. The clap-trap of popular ministers, the pride and uncharitableness of exclusive Evangelicalism, the pomp and pretension of ritualism and priestly affectation—the miserable Pharisaism which ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... in love with a married woman and she with me. . . . To begin with, we had kisses, and calm evenings, and vows, and Spencer, and ideals, and interests in common. . . . What a deception! We really ran away from her husband, but we lied to ourselves and made out that we ran away from the emptiness of the life of the educated class. We pictured our future like this: to begin with, in the Caucasus, while we were getting to know the people and the place, I would put on the Government uniform and enter the service; then at ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... become partly reconciled to the awful mystery of life, to the uselessness of effort; when the emptiness of everything appeared to me in a new light, this evening, ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... journey hither, and I have met with adventures, but of this crowning that was to follow them I knew nought. Wullahy, thrice have I been saluted King; I whom fate selecteth for the shaving of Shagpat, and till now it was a beguilement, all emptiness.' ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... ended. But oh, the emptiness of the morrow! Life without a crime, without a single noble sentiment to brighten it!—no comic uncles, no creamy angels! Oh, the barrenness and dreariness of life! Even my mother at moments was ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... hardly any of the houses had a lighted window. In the old sheepskin coat I had worn on the front and in my high fur hat, I felt like some ghost of the old regime visiting a town long dead. The silence and emptiness of the streets contributed to this effect. Still, the few people I met or passed were talking cheerfully together and the rare sledges and motors had comparatively good roads, the streets being certainly better swept and cleaned ...
— Russia in 1919 • Arthur Ransome
... distinctions between man and the apes remain, upon which so much stress has been laid, that they require careful consideration, in order that the true value may be assigned to those which are real, and the emptiness of those which are fictitious may be exposed. I refer to the characters of the hand, ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... one save himself seemed to have friends here, and many of them. It was indeed a very ordinary place, a cosmopolitan eating-house, good of its sort, and with an excellent connection of lighthearted but impecunious foreigners, who made up with the lightness of their spirits for the emptiness of their purses. To Douglas, whose whole upbringing and subsequent life had been amongst the dreariest of surroundings, there was something about it all peculiarly fascinating. The air of pleasant abandonment, the subtle aroma of gaiety allied with irresponsibility, the strange food and wine, well ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... a curious sensation of weakness and emptiness in my head—as if it were hollow, and a strange disinclination, almost inability, to speak or think. Suddenly this passed away, and the events which I have related in the previous chapters rushed back upon my memory ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... and yet the dreaded, hoped-for day came quickly. The quadrangle of the stone-crowned college grew more awful in its silence and emptiness every time Robert passed it; and the professors' houses looked like the sentry-boxes of the angels of learning, soon to come forth and judge the feeble mortals who dared present a claim to their recognition. October faded softly by, with its keen ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... deem themselves most free, When they within this gross and visible sphere Chain down the winged thought, scoffing ascent, Proud in their meanness; and themselves they cheat With noisy emptiness of learned phrase, Their subtle fluids, impacts, essences, Self-working tools, uncaus'd effects, and all Those blind omniscients, those almighty slaves, Untenanting creation ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... man, the great one in the public eye, he who paid me—put in this and that sonorous phrase, full of echoing emptiness, launched an antithesis which had done good service a time or two on the hustings or in the House of Commons, and—signed the article. Well, I do not object. That was what I was there for, and after all I made myself necessary to the Universal Review. It would ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... revived, on the approach of spring. She was weary of dissipation: the glittering bubble, which at first charmed her eye, had burst, and betrayed its emptiness. She had a mind which panted for the noblest attainments, a heart formed for the enjoyment of every pure and rational pursuit. Her thoughts continually reverted to the first happy months of her union with De Courcy; and she impatiently anticipated the moment, ...
— The Rivals of Acadia - An Old Story of the New World • Harriet Vaughan Cheney
... another wheezing, half-whispered, half-strangled laugh, "see and hear the emptiness thereof! Nothing has been in its belly since cockcrow. And until now have I hungered for a smoke. Twice did I think to come to thee to-day and ask thee for kaitalafu (credit) for five sticks of tobacco, but I said to my pipe, ...
— Pakia - 1901 • Louis Becke
... of the penalty of the unpopularity of the first person singular in modern society falls upon the individual. The hard part of it, for a man who has not the daily habit of being a companion to himself, is his own personal private sense of emptiness—of missing things. All the universe gets itself addressed to some one else—a great showy heartless pantomime it rolls over him, beckoning with its nights and days and winds and faces—always beckoning, but to some one else. All that seems ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... ashamed of his emptiness, he was quite proud of it, as a good many fine gentlemen are, and began flirting and flipping up and down, ...
— The Water-Babies - A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby • Charles Kingsley
... overwhelmed by all that she had done and had left undone. The emptiness and silence of the house brought to her a sense of loneliness. The street outside was empty and silent too, except for two old women who walked by with heavy, dragging steps. One of the two was talking in a patient, pathetic voice, ...
— The Making of Mona • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... duty of the economist," says Mr. Devine, "to accompany the wealth expender to the very threshold of the home, that he may point out, with untiring vigilance, its emptiness, caused not so much by lack of income as by lack of knowledge of ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... tests in the world of what a poet really means is his metre. He may be a hypocrite in his metaphysics, but he cannot be a hypocrite in his prosody. And all the time that Byron's language is of horror and emptiness, his metre is a bounding 'pas de quatre.' He may arraign existence on the most deadly charges, he may condemn it with the most desolating verdict, but he cannot alter the fact that on some walk in a spring morning when all ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... children's fame? Nurse not one changeless humour in thy breast, That nothing can be right but as thou sayest. Whoe'er presumes that he alone hath sense, Or peerless eloquence, or reach of soul, Unwrap him, and you'll find but emptiness. 'Tis no disgrace even to the wise to learn And lend an ear to reason. You may see The plant that yields where torrent waters flow Saves every little twig, when the stout tree Is torn away and dies. The mariner Who will not ever slack the sheet that sways The vessel, but still ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... sin? But now he understands both—the void in his life, the powerlessness of his will. He understands that, like all other energy, spiritual power is contained in Environment. He finds here at last the true root of all human frailty, emptiness, nothingness, sin. This is why "without Me ye can do nothing." Powerlessness is the normal state not only of this but of every organism—of every ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... the room his mind was naturally full of the tidings from Clavering. Count Pateroff and his message had lost some of their importance through this other event, and the emptiness of the childless house was the first subject of conversation between him and Lady Ongar. "I pity my sister greatly," said she. "I feel for her as deeply as I should have done had nothing occurred to separate us—but I cannot feel ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... not taking hands, they swung slowly through the unpeopled emptiness, leaving a tiny scattering of tracks behind, the blue-white ice firm under their feet through a light film of snow. The ice-boat was out of sight, the sprightly and unexpurgated ballad of "Amos Moss," rendered in the closest of close ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... he rode along. It seemed to him that the sleepy little meadows, the quiet murmuring of the creek, even the soft rustling of the cottonwood leaves breathed a new loneliness, an emptiness where the man who had called this place home, who had clung to it in the face of opposition that was growing into open warfare, had lived and left life suddenly—unwarrantably, Lone knew in his heart. It might be of no use to think about it, but the ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... freely,) renouncing and rejecting all their own righteousness, worthiness, interest, and sufficiency, and choosing and appropriating him to themselves, for their righteousness, worthiness, portion, and sufficiency, under a sight and conviction of their own emptiness and deformity; and with a heart-satisfied persuasion of the loveliness and fulness ...
— The Divine Right of Church Government • Sundry Ministers Of Christ Within The City Of London
... talents—a humanized Greek force. He didn't belong to to-day but to yesterday and to-morrow. This gave her an uncomfortable vision of Dodge in space, with no warm points of contact. She, too, was suspended in that vague emptiness. Linda had the sensation of grasping at streamers, forms, of sparkling mist. A strange position in view of her undeniable common sense, the solid foundations of her temperament and experience. She saw from the paper, ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... emotion. Ever since she had lain against Bill Warden's breast, the wild sweet rapture of his hold had seemed to paralyze in her all other feeling. She knew only the longing for his presence, the utter emptiness of a world that held ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... driving them back, his progress had been slow. But he finally came out into the road again and was plodding along the stone wall within half a mile of the house, his face very disconsolate because of his protesting feet and the emptiness in his stomach, when Manuel himself confronted him suddenly ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... of old: Shall they that tell of thee hereafter tell "By him was Thebes raised up, and after fell!" Nay, lift us till we slip no more. Oh, let That bird of old that made us fortunate Wing back; be thou our Oedipus again. And let thy kingdom be a land of men, Not emptiness. Walls, towers, and ships, they all Are nothing with no men to ...
— Oedipus King of Thebes - Translated into English Rhyming Verse with Explanatory Notes • Sophocles |
