"Hollowness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... spoke and smiled her heart ached to see the hollowness of his cheeks and the lines of pain about his young mouth. She guessed that his poor body was all twisted and deformed under the rug that covered it. Signora Aurelia took her out on to their little terrace garden ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... the ignorance, the social prejudices, the inexplicable dissatisfaction which really haunted all things, all combined to undermine this brilliant social life, and there was a general consciousness of its hollowness. ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... figures—warriors on horseback, foot-soldiers with lance and shield, dancing maidens, animals, trees and fruits, and in fine, says the old chronicler, "all things that could delight the eye and the heart;" the hollowness having the further advantage that men could stand inside these hyperbolic tapers and whirl them continually, so as to produce a phantasmagoric effect, which, considering the towers were numerous, must have been calculated to produce dizziness ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... fellow," said the School-Master. "He is full of pretence and hollowness, but he is sometimes ...
— The Idiot • John Kendrick Bangs
... principles of morals, ecclesiastical malignity of the most frantic kind. There are parts of Mr. Froude's volumes which we have read with real pleasure, with real admiration. But the book, as a whole, is vicious in its conception, vicious in its execution. No merit of detail can atone for the hollowness that runs through the whole. Mr. Froude has written twelve volumes, and he has made himself a name in writing them, but he has not written, in the pregnant phrase so aptly quoted by the Duke of Aumale, 'un livre de ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... young fellow John called it, where he came off second best. His departure was no doubt hastened by a note from the landlady's daughter, inclosing a lock of purple hair which she "had valued as a pledge of affection, ere she knew the hollowness of the vows he had breathed," speedily followed by another, inclosing the landlady's bill. The next morning he was missing, as were his limited wardrobe and the trunk that held it. Three empty bottles of Mrs. Allen's celebrated preparation, each of them asserting, on its word of honor as a ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... any fear of the slabs of the battlement falling; the cement was clearly strong enough to bear the weight of the passing sentry; but I had some apprehension that as he tramped along the man might discover the hollowness below him by the ringing of his feet on the stones. But two nights sufficed to banish this fear also, and then we started eagerly on the last ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... allow him a word with her alone. But, idle hope! Gradually it dawned upon him that they had no such intention. To relieve the strain, he became facetious and told funny stories; but this was an unlucky experiment, for his witticisms fell with a ghastly hollowness. No one laughed save the grandmother and the Guatemalan cousin, who could not understand, and at this Kirk fled helter-skelter from the ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... things have I tried, and I am weary of the hollowness, weary of life, and the world. So long as I have your face here, I care not to cross my own threshold till friendly hands bear me out to my quiet resting-place under the willows of Greenwood. Electra, my darling, think ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... folding the curtels overthwart and in breadth, in the which the spirit is drawn from the heart. Wherefore they be harder without than all the other veins, and that is needful lest they break lightly and soon. Also these veins spring out of the left hollowness of the heart. And twain of that side are called Pulsative, of which one that is the innermost hath a nesh skin, and this vein is needful to bring great quantity of blood and spirits to the lungs, and to receive in air, and to medley it with blood, to temper the ferventness ...
— Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus • Robert Steele
... to leave to Polly the role she had undertaken. Frieda sat quite near her, and watched her pretty bright movements with gentle interest, maintaining a silence meanwhile only surpassed in completeness by Dot's. Hannah rattled on, but there was a hollowness in the rattle that made Catherine's hostess heart falter. She was never fluent, herself. Her gentle art consisted in making her guests entertain ...
— The Wide Awake Girls in Winsted • Katharine Ellis Barrett
... heaving. Scotty stopped beside him. There was no sound. Even the night noises of the forest had ceased. There was a weird feeling of hollowness in the air, as though they stood in some great cavern. Rick whispered, "Where did ...
— The Blue Ghost Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... the pan, vox et praeterea nihil [Lat.]. shadow; phantom &c (fallacy of vision) 443; dream &c (imagination) 515; ignis fatuus &c (luminary) 423 [Lat.]; such stuff as dreams are made of [Tempest]; air, thin air, vapor; bubble &c 353; baseless fabric of a vision [Tempest]; mockery. hollowness, blank; void &c (absence) 187. inanity, fool's paradise. V. vanish, evaporate, fade, dissolve, melt away; disappear &c 449. Adj. unsubstantial; baseless, groundless; ungrounded; without foundation, having ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... stubborn in her resentment. He bore this state of things for about a week, when his engagements to lecture in Ohio suddenly called him away. Abel and Miss Ringtop were left to wander about the promontory in company, and to exchange lamentations on the hollowness of human hopes or the pleasures of despair. Whether it was owing to that attraction of sex which would make any man and any woman, thrown together on a desert island, finally become mates, or whether she skilfully ministered to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... was clear, remote, and empty save for a few horizontal bars far down in the sunset. Well, that night the expectation took the colour of my fears. In that darkling calm my senses seemed preternaturally sharpened. I fancied I could even feel the hollowness of the ground beneath my feet: could, indeed, almost see through it the Morlocks on their ant-hill going hither and thither and waiting for the dark. In my excitement I fancied that they would receive my invasion of their burrows as a declaration ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... was evident that Michael was in earnest. He spoke warmly, but with a natural vehemence that by no means disfigured his good-looking visage, now illuminated with unusual fire. In these days of hollowness and hypocrisy, an ingenuous straightforward character is a refreshing spectacle, and commands our admiration, be the principles it represents just what they may. Hence, possibly, the unaffected pleasure with which Margaret listened to her visitor whilst he declaimed against men and things ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... to this homage— ... My fellow-citizens must know me to the core. Then let everyone examine himself, and let us realize the prediction that from this event we begin a new time. The old, with its tinsel, its hypocrisy, its hollowness, its lying propriety, and its pitiful cowardice, shall lie behind us like ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... what I think, and ever will do so; I will be no party man. I don't attempt, like Vincent, to unite opposites. He is of all parties, I am of none. I think I see pretty well the hollowness ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... heavy eyelids and a highbridged nose. When his face was shaded with his wide white hat, his light mustache and lithe figure gave him a look of youth. But the Panama lay on the moss beside him; and the spectator could see that his brow was prematurely bald; and this, combined with a certain hollowness about the eyes, had an air of headwork and even headache. But the most curious thing about him, realized after a short scrutiny, was that, though he looked like a fisherman, he ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... in Catherine's case (a case, how common!), the truth come too late—if the tomb is closed—if the heart you have wrung can be wrung no more—why the truth is as valueless as the epitaph on a forgotten Name! Some such conviction of the hollowness of his own words, when he spoke of service to the dead, smote upon Philip's heart, and stopped the flow ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 5 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... refused the very horse he wanted with the aplomb he had acquired in dismissing undesirable beasts. The fact was he knew less about horses than when he began to buy, while he had indefinitely enlarged his idle knowledge of men, of their fatuity and hollowness. He learned that men whom he had always envied their brilliant omniscience in regard to horses, as they drove him out behind their dashing trotters, were quite ignorant and helpless in the art of buying; they always got somebody else to buy ...
— Buying a Horse • William Dean Howells
... the case, when the promise and interest of youth settles into impotence and rigidity, when the type which once had the die of thought fresh upon it is worn flat by overuse, or when the shell, once the home of life and bright with ocean's spray, lies with faded colour and emptied hollowness. This is melancholy, indeed, and many such wrecks of religious life are around us. But with Enoch, the increase of life's cares brought an access of fresh devotion. New gifts of Providence roused new feelings of gratitude, and he grappled himself the closer ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... the duty of living for it, as also the certainty of holding intercommunion with the spirits. The 'Other worldliness' of the mediaeval monastic mysticism had produced a revolt against a conception of life that was false, its passive hostility to civilisation, the hollowness of its ideal existence, its exaggerated asceticism, its disparagement of the family life, and the result was the swing of the pendulum in the opposite direction. The recoil came with the Methodists. But we cannot live wholly in the world of spirit, ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... countenance of an upper class that loves to despise and humiliate it. Besides the more obvious evils of a position resting entirely on material opulence, and maintaining itself by coarse and glittering ostentation, there is a fatal moral hollowness which infects both serious conduct and social diversion. The result is seen in imitative manners, affected culture, and a mixture of timorous self-consciousness within and noisy self-assertion without, which completes the most distasteful ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... I don't imagine very much to anybody—except, perhaps, to some of the very little ones. There was a hollowness and emptiness about the whole thing; plenty of excitement and a great deal of selfishness, but nothing to make me feel really ...
— Nearly Lost but Dearly Won • Theodore P. Wilson
... being driven off as a punishment for his heterodoxy on matrimonial subjects. This is one explanation of the fact that Leprechawns are always seen alone, though other authorities make the Leprechawn solitary by preference, he having learned the hollowness of fairy friendship and the deceitfulness of fairy femininity, and left the society of his kind in disgust at ...
— Irish Wonders • D. R. McAnally, Jr.
... troubled as he walked on and on through the leafy woods, trundling the basket behind him. Nothing had gone wrong; indeed, everything had been much easier than he could have hoped. Perhaps it was the weariness that had crept into his legs, and the hollowness that began to appear in his stomach; but, somehow, although in the morning he had expected to find Gay's new mothers beckoning from every window, so that he could scarcely choose between them, he now felt as if the whole race of ...
— Timothy's Quest - A Story for Anybody, Young or Old, Who Cares to Read It • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... offer in its room. But the thousands of good men whom it has beguiled, because it professed to meet the earnest craving of their minds for a restoration of Christ's church with power, need not fear to open their eyes to its hollowness; like the false miracles of fraud or sorcery, it is but the counterfeit of a real truth. The restoration of the church, is, indeed, the best consummation of all our prayers, and all our labours; it is not a dream, ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... just as our Chesterfield had interviewed me, infusing even into the homely subject of diet-lists much that was calculated to puff up my vanity, in would stalk Diogenes, who never failed to bring me to a realizing sense of the hollowness of it all. Dr. Hughes was a venerable and excellent gentleman, who constituted himself my mentor. He never failed to drop in every day, being always ready to smooth tangled threads for me. He was forever protesting ...
— Memories - A Record of Personal Experience and Adventure During Four Years of War • Fannie A. (Mrs.) Beers
... infirm old age, shews itself by talkativeness, boasting of the past, hollowness of the eyes and cheeks, dimness of sight, deafness, tremor of voice, the accents, through default of teeth, scarce intelligible; hams weak, knees tottering, head paralytic, hollow coughing, frequent expectoration, breathless wheezing, laborious groaning, the body ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... to human life, none is so penetrating to gentle hearts as that which fills them with aching regrets, and, for a time, writes hollowness and vanity on their dearest treasures, when death robs them of those they love. And so, of all the questions that haunt the soul, wringing its faculties for a solution, beseeching the oracles of the universe for a response, none can have a more intense interest ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... hand the eight compartments directly above the angles of the octagon are narrower than the preceding compartments; they have no windows, and, what is of special importance to note, they are deeply concave.[115] Such marked hollowness is found in later domes as a decorative feature, but here it is primarily and supremely a constructive device. By its means the concave compartments are set slightly back from the octagon's inner face, leaving, at the springing line, portions of the wall-head to appear as little flat ledges ...
— Byzantine Churches in Constantinople - Their History and Architecture • Alexander Van Millingen
... love for the public, I have often accused that body of having no sense of humour. Conscience pricks me to atonement. Let me withdraw my oft-made imputation, and show its hollowness by examining with you, reader (who are, of course, no more a member of the public than I am), what are the main features of that sense of humour which ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... strikingly the farcical nature of public meetings, and the hollowness, worthlessness, and accidental character of popularity, than the circumstances of Durham's arrival here. He has done nothing in Canada, he took himself off just as the fighting was going to begin, his whole conduct has been visited with universal disapprobation, ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... cannot bring myself to burn my books as the converted Magicians did, or sink them as did Prospero. There must, as I think, have been some prodigious defect in his mind, to let him hold such views as his about women and some other things; and in another respect, I find so much coldness and hollowness as to the highest truths, and feel so strongly that the Heaven he looks up to is but a vault of ice,—that these two indications, leading to the same conclusion, go far to convince me he was a profoundly immoral and irreligious spirit, with as rare faculties of intelligence as ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... while its current, though nearing the abyss, flow softly as "the waters of Shiloah." It may be the death of a mother, whom the bereaved half deemed immortal—some disappointment, like the falsehood of one dearly loved—some rude shock, as the discovery of a day-dream's hollowness; happy, thrice happy! if it be but one of these, and not the descent ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... all these wars and tumults in which we bear our share. It is only as I lie here and think (I have, as thou knowest, been here many times before amongst these books and parchments, able for little but study and thought) that there comes over me a strange sense of the hollowness of these earthly strivings and search after fame and glory, a solemn conviction — I scarce know how to frame it in words — that there must be other work to be done in the world, stronger and more heroic deeds ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... have not to banish from the ideal countenance the evidences of sorrow, nor of past suffering, nor even of past and conquered sin, but only the immediate operation of any evil, or the immediate coldness and hollowness of any good emotion. And hence in that contest before noted, between the body and the soul, we may often have to indicate the body as far conquered and outworn, and with signs of hard struggle and bitter pain upon it, and yet without ever diminishing ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... HAROLD. Bring not thy hollowness On our full feast. Famine is fear, were it but Of being starved. Sit down, sit down, and eat, And, when again red-blooded, speak again; (Aside.) The men that guarded England to the South Were scatter'd to ...
— Queen Mary and Harold • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... sort of cynical amusement at this human raree-show; at others he speaks as though he himself were in the very midst of the bustling frivolity of the Roman Vanity Fair, and a sufferer from its follies. Then his tone seems to deepen into a grave intensity of remonstrance, as he exposes its hollowness, its heartlessness, and its blindness to ...
— English Satires • Various
... robes and coronet—the beadle in his gaudy livery of scarlet, and purple, and gold—the dignitary in the fulness of his pomp—the demagogue in the triumph of his hollowness—these and other visual and oral cheats by which mankind are cajoled, have passed in review before us, conjured up by the ...
— Punch, Volume 101, Jubilee Issue, July 18, 1891 • Various
... if this were the case, she ran her fingers over the walls, and, on removing them, found they showed no signs of moisture. Then she rapped the floor and walls, and could discover no indications of hollowness. She sniffed the air, and a great wave of something sweet and sickly half choked her. She drew out her handkerchief and beat the air vigorously with it; but the smell remained, and she could not in any way account ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... in this country, the extravagant length of 200 millions of miles.[292] It was narrow, and bounded by nearly parallel and nearly rectilinear lines, resembling—to borrow a comparison of Aristotle's—a "road" through the constellations; and after the 3rd of March showed no trace of hollowness, the axis being, in fact, rather brighter than the edges. Distinctly perceptible in it were those singular aurora-like coruscations which gave to the "tresses" of Charles V.'s comet the appearance—as Cardan described it—of "a torch agitated ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... the London sparrows had it pretty much to themselves. As things were, Mr. Pryme envied the sparrows, who were ready clothed by Providence, and had no rates and taxes to pay, as well as the clerks, who, at all events, had plenty to do and no time to soliloquize upon the hardness and hollowness of life. To have plenty of brains, and an indefinite amount of spare time to use them in; to desire ardently to hasten along the road towards fortune and happiness, and to be forced to sit idly by whilst others, duller-witted, perchance, and with less capacity for work, are ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... said the warm-hearted old Chevalier, "one whom I love. There is something frank in your eyes which raises memories of my dead son. In you I see both my offspring's and my own youth recalled to me. You are Canadian—in you I can banish the coldness, hollowness, and degeneracy of Europe. Replace my boy. Let me call you 'Germain' ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... himself remember that his house had yet to be built, and aware of the hollowness of his stomach, he said to Amos: "Must be lunch time. Let's go down to the creek ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson
... contention that at most and at worst Japan had only taken over German rights, and that since we had acquiesced in the latter's arrogations we had no call to make a fuss about Japan. It revealed the hollowness of the claim that pro-Chinese propaganda had wilfully misled Americans into confusing the few hundred square miles around the port of Tsing-tao with the Province of Shantung with its ...
— China, Japan and the U.S.A. - Present-Day Conditions in the Far East and Their Bearing - on the Washington Conference • John Dewey
... me that the Nautilus had bumped the underbelly of the Ice Bank, still quite thick to judge from the hollowness of the accompanying noise. Indeed, we had "struck bottom," to use nautical terminology, but in the opposite direction and at a depth of 3,000 feet. That gave us 4,000 feet of ice overhead, of which 1,000 feet emerged above water. So the Ice Bank ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... white brandy made me smile again: he asked me the cause, and I answered that his observation reminded me of the story of a lady offering her condolence to a poor Irishwoman on the death of her child, who stated that she had never been more affected than on the event; the poor woman, knowing the hollowness of the compliment, answered with all the quickness of her country, "Sure, then, Ma'am, that is saying a great deal, for you were always affected." Lord Byron laughed, and said my apropos was very wicked—but I maintained it was very just. He spoke much more warmly of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 556., Saturday, July 7, 1832 • Various
... foot to the other. A sickening feeling of hollowness within him was crying aloud to be appeased by either food or drink, and his shaking body begged for a place to rest itself into tranquillity; but still for a while he stood there, fighting off these yearnings ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... beautiful traditions of whatever nation or clime; at the zenith of success, in the spring-time of youth and hope, on the very eve of joy unutterable, there often seizes on the soul of man an overwhelming sense of the hollowness and fleetingness of life. It is this touch of the spiritual which raises these old heroic poems to such sublime beauty and power. Poetry of this kind implies a nation, one which is still, or has been, great; one which has a past, a legendary history, ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... feeling of dire foreboding to the listener. Not that there was anything in the least terrifying in the strength of the wind—far from it, indeed,—for it was no heavier than a double-reefed topsail breeze, to which the schooner stood up as stiff as a church, but there was a certain indescribable hollowness in the sound of it—that is the only fitting term I can find to apply—that was quite unlike anything that I had heard before, and that somehow seemed, in its ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood
... strong light, through the disguise of the beard. The melancholy which marks the face of any sleeper, a foreshadow of the eternal sleep, had become on this sleeper's countenance a profound sadness. From his seat Curran could see the pitiful droop of the mouth, the hollowness of the eyes, the shadows under the cheek-bones; marks of a sadness too deep for tears. Sonia took his face in her soft hands and turned the right profile to the light. She looked at the full face, smoothed his hair as if trying to recall ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... will regain it, my Emmeline; our Caroline is only dazzled now, she will soon discover the hollowness of Annie's professions of ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume I. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes. • Grace Aguilar
... to match. Thackeray and a Beckett joined later in the sport. But Jerrold, while believing in Thackeray's hatred of the snob, more than suspected him of being a snob himself; and Thackeray felt not less convinced of the hollowness of Jerrold's "stalwartness." "Thackeray had neither love nor respect for Jerrold's democracy," Vizetelly tells us. "I remember him mentioning to me his having noticed at the Earl of Carlisle's a presentation copy of one of Jerrold's books, the inscription ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... The accuracy or the hollowness of M. Bergson's doctrine, according as we take it for literary psychology or for natural philosophy, will appear clearly in the following instance. "Any one," he writes,[3] "who has ever practised literary ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... literally turned her lines end for end, as it were. For she had absolutely no "straight of breadth" at all; her sides were as round as an apple, and her long bow, shaped like a wedge with curved instead of straight sides, with just a suggestion of hollowness of the water-line as it approached the stem, started almost as far aft as the point where her mainmast was stepped; while her run, instead of fining away toward the stern-post like the tail of a fish, was quite full, sweeping round under ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... writings. There are no illusions in it, and, to a young reader fresh from Scott's romances or Dickens's sympathetic extravagances, it will seem hard and repellant. But men who, like Thackeray, have seen life and tasted its bitterness and felt its hollowness, know how to prize it. Thackeray does not merely expose the cant, the emptiness, the self-seeking, the false pretenses, flunkeyism, and snobbery—the "mean admiration of mean things"—in the great world of London society: his keen, unsparing vision detects the base alloy ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... freshened in the afternoon, and a cross sea rose which obliged us to reef the sails, and made the boat very wet. At four we close reefed and hauled to the wind, but this was not enough; the increased hollowness of the waves caused the boat to labour so much, that every plunge raised an apprehension that some of the planks would start from the timbers. Having no other resource, we emptied one of the two casks of water, threw over-board the stones of ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis Volume 2 • Matthew Flinders
... did not want any more to do the things that offered. Something dead within him just refused to respond to any suggestion. He cast over in his mind, what it would be possible to do, to save himself from this misery of nothingness, relieve the stress of this hollowness. And there were only three things left, that would rouse him, make him live. One was to drink or smoke hashish, the other was to be soothed by Birkin, and the third was women. And there was no-one for the moment to drink with. Nor was ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... moon, and strange noises are heard in the air, as of pipes, trumpets, and drums, which are caused perhaps by the vehement motions of these fiery exhalations, as we see in many experiments wrought by fire, air, and wind. The hollowness also, and various reflections and breakings of the clouds, may be great causes thereof, besides the great coldness of the middle region of the air, by which these fiery exhalations, when they ascend there, are suddenly driven back with great force. Daily experience ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... of The Pillars of Society was the hollowness and rottenness of those supports, and the severe and unornamented prose which Ibsen now adopted was very favorable to its discussion. He was accused, however, of having lived so long away from home as to have fallen out of touch with ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... converted into a victory: but Acre could not be termed anything but a reverse. In vain did the commander and his staff proclaim that, after dispersing the Turks at Mount Tabor, the capture of Acre was superfluous; his desperate efforts in the early part of May revealed the hollowness of his words. There were, it is true, solid reasons for his retreat. He had just heard of the breaking out of the war of the Second Coalition against France; and revolts in Egypt also demanded his presence.[116] But these last events furnished a damning commentary ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... advent of tea, he had accomplished what she had fervently wished for the night she had met him—he succeeded, by several easy moves, in isolating her from her aunt, and, notwithstanding her admiration, her desire to tap with her knuckles the metal of her idol and listen for a ring of hollowness, she was alarmed. Yet, perversely, she knew that he would not exhibit his paces before his wife—naturally a disinterested spectator—or before her aunt, who was hardly "intimate" enough. The long-desired hour found her disquieted. She did not have many ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... Faith, was it likely to combine against one who, in spite of all his enormities, was still an orthodox Christian? And, without a combination of princes to execute them, papal censures, excommunications, interdicts, and all the spiritual paraphernalia, served only to probe the hollowness of papal pretensions, and to demonstrate the deafness of Europe to the calls of religious enthusiasm. In Spain, at least, it might have been thought that every sword would leap from its scabbard at a summons ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... shy, unaccustomed endearment. Gordon was stereotyped, commonplace; he was certain that even she must recognize the hollowness of his protestations. But she never doubted him; she accepted the dull, leaden note of his spurious passion for the clear ring ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... these words have for us all! How they winnow our works of Christian activity! How they show us the hollowness of our services, the self-indulgence of our lives, the coldness of our devotion, the cowardice of our faith! How marvellous they make the fruits which God's great goodness has permitted us to see even from our doubting service! Let us turn to ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... that such men take as wives—as second-selves—women young, modest, sincere, pure in heart and life, with feelings all fresh and emotions all unworn, and bind such virtue and vitality to their own withered existence, such sincerity to their own hollowness, such disinterestedness to their own haggard avarice—to think this, troubles the soul to its inmost depths. Nature and justice forbid the banns of ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... Scythrop. There is a girl concealed in this tower, and find her I will. There are such things as sliding panels and secret closets.'—He sounded round the room with his cane, but detected no hollowness.—'I have heard, sir,' he continued, 'that during my absence, two years ago, you had a dumb carpenter closeted with you day after day. I did not dream that you were laying contrivances for carrying on secret intrigues. Young men will have their way: I had my way when I was a young ...
— Nightmare Abbey • Thomas Love Peacock
... that were wholly pathetic, and then the hour for Rupert's departure all too suddenly arrived. They separated with ostentatious whooping, and then Johnny, suddenly overcome with the dreadfulness of all earthly things, and the hollowness of life generally, instantly resolved ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... Sovereign Being who is infinite by His very definition. He demands upon what principles they rest, and presses them to point them out. He examines all that they bring forward, and so searches them by his wonderful penetration as to show the hollowness of what passes for the most clear and established truths. He inquires if the soul knows anything whatever—if it knows itself; whether it is substance or accident, body or spirit; what is each of these things, and if there is ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... American woman in Congress? I mention Elizabeth, Maria Theresa, Catherine, and all the famous Empresses and Queens, not to prove the capacity of women for the most arduous and responsible office, for that is undeniable, but to show the hollowness of the assertion that there is an instinctive objection to the fulfillment of such offices by women. Men who say so do not really think so. The whole history of the voting and office-holding of ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... itself that it sometimes appears desirable to retain. Sometimes, from the heart of a man, there breaks forth a sigh for perpetual youth. In the perplexities of mature years,—in the experience of selfishness, and hollowness, and bitter disappointment; in the surfeit of pleasure; in utter weariness of the world,—he exclaims, "O! give me back that sweet morning of my days, when all my feelings were fresh, and the heart was wet with a perpetual dew. Give ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... tawdry frippery, and sits in her lonely chamber, glowering at the image of the young rival who has won all the applause,—when she bemoans her waning charms and the wearisome life which has lost its sparkle, and sees its emptiness and hollowness,—does she not look wistfully at that little flame which flickers on her hollowing cheek, from which the stage-blush has been washed, and think the game a losing one? The Senator lives near by, and that is Madame's room over the way. Did ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... fierce, shallow war of society, or its faded and jaded hollowness, is to be found in generous friendships, begotten by a common pursuit of the holiest ends of existence. In the nurture of these relations, by every law of fitness and want, it belongs to women to take the lead. The realm of the affections, with its imperious exactions and its imperial largesses, ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... intemperate sunlight and the great hill. The hollowness of life as they lived it came home to them with an aching force. Yet she lifted her fan from the table and fanned herself gently with it, and he mechanically lit a cigar. Servants passed in and out removing the things from the table. Presently ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... highest and holiest thing on earth. It has come, this ethical Church, to reinforce the wholly forgotten teaching of the Hebrew prophets of the utter emptiness of all religion devoid of moral life, the vanity of sacrifices, oblations and rites, the hollowness of formularies, creeds and confessions, the indispensable necessity of an ethical basis for all religious belief and practice. "What more," asks Micah, "doth the Lord require of thee than to do justice, love mercy, and to walk humbly ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... would praise the golden silence of the Dark Ages and be talking all the time. And surely the hourly failure to act up to your principles, the hourly and conscious apostacy from your ideal, could beget nothing in the character but hollowness and weakness. No student of history can fail to see the moral interest of the Middle Ages, any more than an artist can fail to see their aesthetic interest. There were some special types of noble character then, of which, when they ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... in its lower third, with slight falling in beneath the loins and hollowness of the back are significant symptoms, though they may be entirely absent. Swelling and firmness of the udder, with the smoothing out of its wrinkles, is a suggestive sign, even though it appears only ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... the tie cutter's cabin, and for many minutes he stared and listened, while Peter seemed to stand without breathing. Then making a wide megaphone of his hands, he shouted. It was an alarming thing to do and Peter started as if struck. For there were only ghosts to answer back and the hollowness of a shriven pit for the cry to travel in. Nothing was there. Even the great sawdust piles had shrunk into black scars under the ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... Polly that real Romance came out of dreamland into life, and intoxicated and gladdened him with sweetly beautiful suggestions—and left him. She came and left him as that dear lady leaves so many of us, alas! not sparing him one jot or one tittle of the hollowness of her ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... of the Peace of Utrecht, or to abandon his desire for the Hanoverian succession. Distrusting the sincerity of Harley's pretended exertions, he resolutely refused to hold intercourse with a Minister of whose hollowness he had already received many proofs. Nor was the Duchess less determined never to pardon the injuries which she conceived herself and her husband to have sustained from Harley. All offers of his aid, all attempts to lend to him the influence which Marlborough's ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... pure fairy tales; and the social economist or the historian who builds on such phantoms as that of a rustic aristocracy still retaining any substantial grounds of distinction from the town aristocracies, proclaims the hollowness of any and all his doctrines that depend upon such assumptions. Lord Carbery was a thorough fox-hunter. The fox- hunting of the adjacent county of Leicestershire was not then what it is now. The state of the land was radically different for the foot of the horse, the nature and distribution of ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... phrases, and are usually divided into short sections or paragraphs by the use of red ink for the first sentence of each. Such is the Instruction of Ptah-hotep on morality (the finest of its class); the Instruction of King Amenemhe'et on the hollowness of friendship and other matters; the Instruction of Deu'of, the son of Kherti, on the excellence of the literary life; and others. In many respects and in many details they greatly resemble the didactic works of the Old ...
— The Instruction of Ptah-Hotep and the Instruction of Ke'Gemni - The Oldest Books in the World • Battiscombe G. Gunn
... and sought the Queen, upon that odious embassy with whose ends he was so entirely out of sympathy. He used arguments whose hollowness was not more obvious to the Queen ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... Are we living in filial communion with him, or living without him in the world?" If unreconciled, we must not think to work ourselves up into a degree of goodness or pious feeling without God. There is no strength where there is no confidence, where there is nothing to lean on, where there is hollowness within. We ought to come at once to God. We ought to lift our hearts to him, not saying, "Who shall go up to heaven for us, to bring him to us? Who shall go over the sea for us?" For his word is very nigh, in our ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... bright, intermittent color, the emaciation, the hollowness of the eyes. The effect, so far, was to add to Kitty's natural distinction, to give, rather, a touch of pathos to a face which even in its wildest mirth had in it something alien and remote. But she, too, reflected that a little more, a very little more, ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... ear with the air of a man who had experience in discriminating such sounds. "Hartigan," said he, "you'll condescend to kiss the book, sir, if you please: there's a hollowness in that smack, my good fellow, that can't ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... taunts and mutual revilings. The listener by the rock learnt definitely what he had previously suspected—that there was bitter blood and bad feeling between the two men, buried for a time, but now revived with a savageness which revealed the hollowness of their supposed reconciliation. It was about a girl, some girl in England with whom they had both been in love. Thalassa gathered that Remington had left England as the favoured suitor. He had (in Thalassa's words) "cut ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... more. Grief boundeth where it falls, Not with the empty hollowness, but weight: I take my leave before I have begun, For sorrow ends not when it seemeth done. Commend me to thy brother, Edmund York. Lo! this is all: nay, yet depart not so; Though this be all, do not so quickly go; I shall remember ...
— The Tragedy of King Richard II • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... and had aged parents and brothers and sisters dependent on her exertions; but her Christian employer paid her the lowest possible price, and trampled on her feelings as though she had been a brute. Oh, the hollowness of the religion I saw practiced! I sneered at everything connected with churches, and heard no more sermons, which seemed only to make hypocrites and pharisees of the congregation. I have never known ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... in one of what to smaller people appears entirely and absolutely antagonistic, of utmost scientific scepticism and highest spiritual faith and worth. "He was filled full with the scepticism, bitterness, hollowness, and thousandfold contradictions of his time, till his heart was like to break; yet he subdued all this, rose victorious over this, and manifoldly, by word and act, showed others that came after how to do ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... a thing is life! Good God! so mean, that at this moment I can not explain to my own soul why man should cling to it. What do we meet during our short career? Deceit, hypocrisy, and treachery. Ah! death reveals the hollowness of life.' ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... for Pilate to see the hollowness of this sudden loyalty to Caesar. He returns to the beautiful marble judgment hall, and has Jesus brought to him again. He looks into Jesus' face. He is keen enough to see that here is no political schemer. At most probably a religious enthusiast, or reformer, ...
— Quiet Talks about Jesus • S. D. Gordon
... clique; and my devout hope is that it will be given everywhere as soon as possible. Once it is seen without the quasi-religious, or rather mock-religious, character of the Bayreuth performances, the hollowness, trumpery staginess and evil tendency of the work will be only too obvious, and if Bayreuth wants a monopoly of it no one will ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... Purplish colour on the outside, and white within like Milk, and in the end of Summer becometh hard and woody. Whether this be the very same kind, I cannot affirm, but both the Picture and Description come very neer to that I have, but that he seems not to take notice of the hollowness or Worm, for which 'tis most observable. And therefore 'tis very likely, if men did but take notice, they might find very many differing Species of these Nuts, Ovaries, or Matrixes, and all of them to have much the same designation and office. And I have ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... rose with slow dignity to respond to the bow of each person that entered. She listened to the condolences but answered never a word, overcoming her physical pain by rigidity of bearing. Pierre, who had learnt to know her, could divine, however, by the hollowness of her cheeks, the emptiness of her eyes, and the bitter twinge of her mouth, how frightful was the collapse within her. Not only was her race ended, but her brother would never be pope, never secure the elevation which she had so long fancied ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... Heaven's gate in yon fair reflection as learn to love in this light-minded, deceitful city," Hilarius said to himself a little bitterly. He deemed that he had plumbed its hollowness and learnt the full measure of its vanity. Already he shunned the company and diversions of his fellow pages, though he was ever ready to serve them. A prentice lad's homely brawl set him shivering; a woman's jest painted his cheeks 'til they rivalled a young maid's at her first wooing. He plucked ...
— The Gathering of Brother Hilarius • Michael Fairless
... another's opinions when you do not; to deceive by a glance of the eye, a nod of the head, a smile, a gesture; to lack sincerity; to assume to know or think or feel what you do not—all these are but various manifestations of hollowness and falsehood resulting from ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... would deem, that scent Of water and an apple, could have prov'd Powerful to generate such pining want, Not knowing how it wrought? While now I stood Wond'ring what thus could waste them (for the cause Of their gaunt hollowness and scaly rind Appear'd not) lo! a spirit turn'd his eyes In their deep-sunken cell, and fasten'd then On me, then cried with vehemence aloud: "What grace is this vouchsaf'd me?" By his looks I ne'er had recogniz'd him: but the voice Brought to my knowledge what his cheer ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... than the Allies. Their losses elude the inquiries of the statistician. They consisted in the utter discredit of the royalist cause throughout France, the resentment that ever follows on clumsy or disloyal co-operation, and the revelation of the hollowness of the imposing fabric of the First Coalition. In the south of France four nations failed to hold a single fortress which her own sons had ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... done in many weighty matters), and go by his advice still; and in his best consideration recall this hideous rashness: for he would answer with his life, his judgment that Lear's youngest daughter did not love him least, nor were those empty-hearted whose low sound gave no token of hollowness. When power bowed to flattery, honour was bound to plainness. For Lear's threats, what could he do to him, whose life was already at his service? That should ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... cymbal and empire no burthen to be borne. His feeling for the sweetness of home || modern. In this the secret of his happiness, || hgd. (b) His justification or raison d'etre explanation of the eunuch system. Why doesn't he point out its hollowness also? Not from any lack of sympathy with this barren mankind. Cf. Gadatas. I think this all logically follows if the {arkhon} is to rule political enemies as well as friends: to do so {epistamenos} ["asian expert"] ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... was ostentatious; he was not above stooping to mean, unmanly compliances with the humours of the Queen. But he was a man with a higher ideal than he attempted to follow. He saw, not without cynical scorn, through the shows and hollowness of the world. His intellect was of that clear and unembarrassed power which takes in as wholes things which other men take in part by part. And he was in its highest form a representative of that spirit of adventure into the unknown and the wonderful of which ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... themselves before him. On the other hand, such dogmas of the Church as he found to have no warrant in Scripture, nor to harmonise with the Scriptural doctrine of salvation, frequently faded from his notice, and perished even before he was fully conscious of their hollowness. The new knowledge had ripened with him before the old husk was ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... Well might ye cry, "Our cradle be our tomb!" Could ye foresee your spirit's broken wings, Earth's brightest triumphs what despised things, Friendship how feeble, love how fierce a flame, Your joy half sorrow, half your glory shame, Hollowness, weariness, and, worst of all, Self-scorn that pities not its own deep fall, Fast gathering darkness, and fast waning light,— Oh could ye see it all, ye might, ye might Cower in the dust, unequal to the strife, And die, but in ...
— Poems • Frances Anne Butler
... be godlike. The painted scenes were my world. I knew nothing but shadows, and I thought them real. You came—oh, my beautiful love!—and you freed my soul from prison. You taught me what reality really is. To-night, for the first time in my life, I saw through the hollowness, the sham, the silliness of the empty pageant in which I had always played. To-night, for the first time, I became conscious that the Romeo was hideous, and old, and painted, that the moonlight in the orchard was false, that the scenery was vulgar, and that the ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... assumption was rife at the end of the eighteenth century that Christianity was discredited in the minds of all free and reasonable men. Its tenets were incompatible with that which enlightened men infallibly knew to be true. It could be no long time until the hollowness and sham would be patent to all. Even the interested and the ignorant would be compelled to give it up. Of course, the invincibly devout in every nation felt of instinct that this was not true. They felt ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... in debt, and with credit exhausted, she found herself entirely at the end of her resources. How thoroughly did the banished woman then realise the woes of exile—how hard it is to climb and descend the stranger's stair, experience the hollowness of his promise, and the arrogance of his commiseration. And, finally, as though fated to drain her cup of bitterness to the last drop, to learn that she, her long-loved bosom friend and royal mistress, who owed her, at the very least, a silent fidelity, had openly ranged herself ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... weariness they scrape together enough for each day, going by mountain and wilderness seeking their food; so faint and enfeebled are they that their bowels cleave to their ribs, and all their body reechoes with hollowness, and they walk as people affrighted, the face and body in likeness of death. If they be merchants, they now sell only cakes of salt ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... anxious to discover our boy's whereabouts, when, by the same mail, I am advised by him that he is on board the very boat of which you claim to be Captain and owner. I of course take my boy's word in preference to that of any stranger. Having thus detected the hollowness of your sympathy, and the falseness of your pretended friendship for my husband, I must request you to refrain from further meddling in this ...
— Raftmates - A Story of the Great River • Kirk Munroe
... could lay hands to be executed. Thus terminated the events at Pekin in the absolute and complete triumph of the rebel Li Tseching, and the panic produced by his success and severity blinded observers to the hollowness of his power, and to the want of solidity in his administration. Yet it seemed for a time as if he were left the virtual master ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... on that occasion is only a confirmation of the truth of the Duke of Wellington's view of the state of administration, and of the hollowness of their support on any question which is not vital. I suppose they now look to replace the Doctor and Van. by Peel and Canning, who are evidently extremely disposed to ...
— Memoirs of the Court of George IV. 1820-1830 (Vol 1) - From the Original Family Documents • Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... shilling's worth of property in the whole world. From January to May he waited for the tardy justice of the French court. When his suit became too urgent, he was told that he had offended the Most Christian King by attacking the fur posts under the protection of a friendly monarch, King Charles. The hollowness of that excuse became apparent when the French government sanctioned the fitting out of two vessels for Radisson to go to Hudson Bay in the spring. Lord Preston, the English ambassador, was also playing ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... November, and on the 1st of December Clerkenwell Prison was blown up, in an ineffectual attempt to liberate the Fenian prisoners confined in it. On the 20th of December Matthew Arnold wrote to his mother, "We are in a strange uneasy state in London, and the profound sense I have long had of the hollowness and insufficiency of our whole system of administration does not inspire me with much confidence." The "strange uneasy state" was not confined to London, but prevailed everywhere. Obviously England was threatened by a mysterious and desperate enemy, ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... Caerdyf, {77} situated on the banks of the river Taf. In the neighbourhood of Newport, which is in the district of Gwentluc, {78} there is a small stream called Nant Pencarn, {79} passable only at certain fords, not so much owing to the depth of its waters, as from the hollowness of its channel and muddy bottom. The public road led formerly to a ford, called Ryd Pencarn, that is, the ford under the head of a rock, from Rhyd, which in the British language signifies a ford, ...
— The Itinerary of Archibishop Baldwin through Wales • Giraldus Cambrensis
... of the hollowness and falseness of these professions of friendship. The compliments and favors which he offered to them were equally hollow and heartless. He wished to secure their favor as a means of aiding him up the steep path to fame and power which he was attempting ...
— Alexander the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... author has disclosed the inward disease, the fearful hollowness, the spiritual death, of the nation's philosophical and theological forms, with resistless eloquence; and like the Jews of old, they will exclaim, "That man ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... fiery style, the numerous blunders in grammar and spelling, the terse thought, and the concise form, are all characteristic of Napoleon. The right of petition, the recital of unjust acts, the illegal action of the council, the use of force, the hollowness of the pretexts under which their request had been refused, the demand that the troops be withdrawn and redress granted—all these are crudely but forcibly presented. The document presages revolution. Under ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... case of very young children, this could not possibly be taken seriously. The least observant normal boy or girl would recognize the hollowness of the pessimism that prevents an old man from at least an attempt ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... there is only holes in the ether." The World is made out of Nothing, and all Supernal Beauty would seem to be an approach to the Divine Mystery of Nothingness. "Clay is fashioned, and thereby the pot is made; but it is its hollowness that makes it useful," said the first and greatest of the Mystics. "By cutting out doors and windows the room is formed; it is the space which makes the room's use. So that when things are useful it is that in them which is Nothing which makes them useful." ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... with a kind of feudal system of architecture; this will presently be done away with, for the American character is eclectic, and naturally selects and combines the best in art, as in politics and commerce. To combine English good sense without its heaviness, French vivacity without its hollowness, and the exuberance of German fancy without its inertia—to combine and reflect all these should be ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... his drama on Liberty prove, felt the might of the ideal of the Third Age with all the vibrating emotion which genius imparts.[6] But he was the first to discover its hollowness, and bade the world, in epigram or in prose tale, in lyric or in drama, to seek its peace where he himself had found it, in Art. So the labour of the scientific theorist, negatively beneficent by the impulsion of man's spirit beyond science, brings ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... I somehow entertained a belief that we had met before. Under what circumstances, or where, I could not recollect. The wistfulness of that white face, the slight hollowness of the cheeks, the unnaturally dark eyes, all seemed familiar to me; yet although for half an hour I strove to bring back to my mind where I had seen her, it was to no purpose. In all probability I had attended her ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... his celebrated Letter to Lord Chesterfield, says, in reference to the hollowness of patronage: "The shepherd, in Virgil, grew at last acquainted with Love; and found him a native of the rocks." To what passage in Virgil does Johnson here refer, and what is the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 203, September 17, 1853 • Various
... a kind of roofed over-room, open only at the front, and examined the floor with his lantern, stamping occasionally to detect any hollowness in the ground. ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... knew herself to be a woman could not interest herself in these things to which she tried to give attention. She felt that in giving herself to these things she would betray Life. She felt the hollowness, the shallowness, the emptyness of it all in comparison with that which is divinely committed to womankind. She could not but wonder: what would be the racial outcome? When women have long enough substituted other ideals for the ideals of motherhood—other ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright
... sin and death, and the former is so often the father of the other. Service has seen this in the far, hard, cruel northland as no other can see it. The hollowness of material things he learns from this land of yellow gold, the very soul of the material quest of the world. He learns that "It isn't the gold that we're wanting, so much as ...
— Giant Hours With Poet Preachers • William L. Stidger
... when he has business on his hands and all his engines at work, he is still worse when he has nothing to do, and we only see into the hollowness of his heart. His indifference when Othello falls into a swoon, ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... his argument. But he was also a staunch believer in forced labour, which was quite a different thing. Consequently we found ourselves condemned to some of the most filthy tasks conceivable. Incidentally, however, these duties only served to reveal still more convincingly the hollowness of Germany's preachings concerning the principles of health and hygiene to the whole world while herself practising the diametrically opposite. We were commanded to clean out the ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... country around it is a vast treeless prairie, upon which scarcely a shrub is to be seen; but a thick coat of grass covers it throughout its entire extent, with the exception of a few spots where the hollowness of the ground has collected a little moisture, or the meandering of some small stream or rivulet enriches the soil, and covers its banks with ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... glory, that posthumous fame (which for profound ends of providence has been endowed with a subtle power of fraud such as no man can thoroughly look through; for those who, like myself, despise it most completely, cannot by any art bring forward a rationale, a theory of its hollowness that will give plenary satisfaction except to those who are already satisfied). Thus Cicero, feeling that if this were nothing, then had all his life been a skirmish, one continued skirmish for shadows and nonentities; ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... This wood he flung into the mouth of the lair, started the fire with his flint and steel, and when the flames began to wreathe the branches hungrily, he flung on leaves and grass to make a "smudge." His suspicions regarding the hollowness of the tree proved true, for the draft through the hollow hole acted like a chimney and sucked the smoke upward. It began to wreathe out between the first limbs, some thirty feet or ...
— With Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga • W. Bert Foster
... trackless labyrinths, unapproachable nebulosities." Even among these intimates of his own generation were doubtless some who, with F. Tennyson again, believed him to be "a man of infinite learning, jest, and bonhomie, and a sterling heart that reverbs no hollowness," but who yet held "his school of poetry" to be "the most grotesque conceivable." This was the tone of the 'Fifties, when Tennyson's vogue was at its height. But with the 'Sixties there began to emerge a critical ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... she exclaimed, with a disappointed air, whose hollowness was proved by her rising redness and her half-guilty low laugh. ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... believes that he is going to live a plain unsophisticated life, according to nature and common sense, in company with one whom the hollowness and trickishness of society has never infected. He is not long in finding out his irreparable blunder. The lady is not received. People do not visit her, and although one of his motives in choosing ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... breath, and leaned on his cane for support. He realised now the hollowness of his previous anger. He had never for a moment believed the boy was going to the bad. Down underneath his crustiness was a deep love for his son and a strong faith in him. He had allowed his old habit of domineering to get the better of him, ...
— Revenge! • by Robert Barr
... thirty spokes unite in the one nave; but it is on the empty space (for the axle), that the use of the wheel depends. Clay is fashioned into vessels; but it is on their empty hollowness, that their use depends. The door and windows are cut out (from the walls) to form an apartment; but it is on the empty space (within), that its use depends. Therefore, what has a (positive) existence serves ...
— Tao Teh King • Lao-Tze
... heart-sick!" declared Fred. "There is nothing but selfishness and hollowness and greed. Are ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... year and the air was thick with politics. Mark Twain was no longer actively interested in the political situation; he was only disheartened by the hollowness and pretense of office-seeking, and the methods of office-seekers in general. Grieved that Twichell should still pin his faith to any party when all parties were so obviously venal and time-serving, he wrote in ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... lights were blooming like flowers, and above them a few stars shone faintly over the obscure frowning outlines of the buildings. Fifth Avenue was thronged, and to her anxious mind there seemed to be hollowness and insincerity in the laughter ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow |
