"Meaningless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Herrick with a toothless smile that was shocking in its savagery; and his ear caught apparently by the trivial expression he had used, broke into a piece of the chorus of a comic song which he must have heard twenty years before in London: meaningless gibberish that, in that hour and place, seemed hateful as a blasphemy: 'Hikey, pikey, crikey, fikey, ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... along pensively. If it is wide enough for two vehicles, he throws his horses straight across the road and enters upon a prolonged examination of his rear axle. If the road is wide enough for three vehicles, he drives zigzag. The necessity of conserving our natural resources would seem to be a meaningless phrase when we consider the natural resources of an American farmer ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... car at the village and was on the point of starting off on horseback to meet me, when it returned. He sent it ahead and followed on horseback. You know how I was picked up at the cross-roads. It is all so like one of those picture puzzles. By putting the meaningless pieces together one obtains a complete design. The last piece to go into this puzzle is the mishap that befell Naismith on that very afternoon. He was no doubt thwarted in his design to waylay me on the road from Spanish Falls by a singular ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon
... of vulgar, meaningless, familiar slang, they recalled their innumerable triumphs; for all three of them, according to their own stories, had been applauded, laden with laurel-wreaths, and carried ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... years she had gone down into this street confident of herself, mingling on equal terms with its wayfarers, her ear catching and translating the sounds that, converging, caused this babel. Now, suddenly, all of it was meaningless, the peddlers with whom she had bickered and bargained in a loud voice with gestures, breast to breast, were strangers and the street an alien land. Many things seemed to have passed backward out of her life. She was no longer ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... ungrateful. A good man returns a benefit, a bad man does not receive one. If this be so, no man, good or bad, can be ungrateful. Therefore, there is no such thing in nature as an ungrateful man: the word is meaningless." We Stoics have only one kind of good, that which is honourable. This cannot come to a bad man, for he would cease to be bad if virtue entered into him; but as long as he is bad, no one can bestow a benefit upon him, because ...
— L. Annaeus Seneca On Benefits • Seneca
... the little group gathered in the snow-swept cemetery remained silent. The lamp, shaking in the district attorney's hand, illuminated each detail of the casket's interior linings. Bobby tried to realize that, except for these meaningless embellishments, the box was empty. That was what held them all—the void, the unoccupied silken couch in which they had seen Silas Blackburn's body imprisoned. Yet the screws which the detective had removed, and the mass of earth, packed down and covered with ...
— The Abandoned Room • Wadsworth Camp
... meaning in it all, he had said, meaningless as it often seemed. Some meaning that would show ...
— The Way of the Wind • Zoe Anderson Norris
... and an insult: his soul rebelled at being made a passive party to such a bargain; and he began himself to play the retaliatory part which a wronged nature naturally suggests to itself. Like Leta, he learned to hold out the limpid hand in careless greeting, or to mutter meaningless and cold compliments, and, in any communication with her, to assume all the appearances of indifferent acquaintanceship. At first, indeed, it was with an aching heart struggling in his breast, and an agony of wounded spirit ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... been other "voyages to the moon," but none of higher merit than the one just mentioned. That of Bergerac is utterly meaningless. In the third volume of the "American Quarterly Review" will be found quite an elaborate criticism upon a certain "journey" of the kind in question—a criticism in which it is difficult to say whether the critic most exposes ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... the limits of the flesh and to grasp ideality. The issue is made clear in Mackaye's drama. There Sappho's rival is Thalassa, Phaon's slave-mate, who conceives as love's only culmination the bearing of children. Sappho, in her superiority, points out that mere perpetuation of physical life is a meaningless circle, unless it leads to some higher satisfaction. But in the end the figure of "the eternal mother," as typified by Thalassa, is more powerful than is Sappho, in the struggle for Phaon's love. Thus Aphrodite asserts her unwillingness to have love refined into ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... Felicie colored highly, much gratified to find her cousin as generous as she desired him to be. She looked at her sister, who suddenly guessed the fact that during her absence the poor girl had allowed herself to be caught by Pierquin's meaningless gallantries. ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... States, and perfectly healthy, conveyed that suggestion of the Old World which lends a peculiar charm to these towns. And Grass Valley really is a town, having seven thousand inhabitants; and is, withal, clean, picturesque and altogether delightful. One understood why "Tuolumne" sounded meaningless to those small boys. Thus early in life they were under influences which will probably keep them in after years—as they kept their fathers—permanent citizens of the town of ...
— A Tramp Through the Bret Harte Country • Thomas Dykes Beasley
... food. This is ambiguous. To speak of animals as being in a state of nature, conveys the distinct idea of their living according to their own instinct and reason, uninterfered with, in any way, by man. The phrase, applied to man, is either meaningless, or has a meaning varying with the views of each speaker. If it has any definite meaning, it must surely be the giving way to the animal impulses and instincts; to cast off all the artifices of civilisation, to give ...
— The Chemistry of Food and Nutrition • A. W. Duncan
... and trains, and cows and horses were quite meaningless to him, but not quite so baffling as the odd little figures which appeared beneath and between the colored pictures—some strange kind of bug he thought they might be, for many of them had legs though nowhere could he find one with eyes and a ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... be tired expecting by this time," returned Mollie practically. "Now will you please repeat that somewhat meaningless jumble of words, Betty dear? What was it—something about somebody's son having a good ...
— The Outdoor Girls at the Hostess House • Laura Lee Hope
... British press ever since the attempt to establish reciprocity between the United States and the Dominion. It is a question if the glib users of the phrase have the faintest idea what they mean by it. It is a catchword. It sounds ominously deep as the owl's wise but meaningless "too-whoo." English publicists who have never been nearer Canada than a Dominion postage stamp wisely warn Canada against the siren ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... of the series was given at the opening of the Architectural Museum at South Kensington, January 13th, 1858, entitled "The Deteriorative Power of Conventional Art over Nations;" in which he showed that naturalism, as opposed to meaningless pattern-making, was always a sign of life. For example, the strength of the Greek, Florentine and Venetian art arose out of the search for truth, not, as it is often supposed, out of striving after an ideal of beauty; and as soon as nature was superseded by recipe, the ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... leads to a corruption of the doctrine of justification, the very heart of Christianity. And as both must be carefully distinguished, so both must also be upheld and preached in the Church; for the Gospel presupposes the Law and is rendered meaningless without it. Wherever the Law is despised, disparaged, and corrupted, the Gospel, too, cannot be kept intact. Whenever the Law is assailed, even if this be done in the name of the Gospel, the latter is, in reality, hit harder than the former. The cocoon ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... in sputtering rage, she turned to her duty, aiding, with gentle touch and tender though meaningless words, her sister woman through ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor
... else was downstairs, the eldest boy, Ronald, saw, floating in the bath, the body of a hoary-headed old man. It was bloated and purplish blue, and had big, glassy eyes that stared at him in such a hideous, meaningless manner that he uttered a scream of terror and fled. Alarmed at the noise, most of the household ran to see what had happened. Only the Captain remained behind. He knew only too well, and he hid, letting his wife and ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... that Pao-yue was gifted with such a peculiar temperament, that he even looked upon flattering or auspicious phrases with utter aversion, treating them as meaningless and consequently insincere, so when, after listening to those truths, she had spoken with such pathos, he, lapsed into another of his melancholy moods, she blamed herself for the want of consideration she had betrayed. Hastily therefore putting on a smile, she tried to ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... suddenly upon some wild sight of nature—a mountain forest lashed by a tempest, a ship tossed about upon a stormy sea. Jurgis had an unpleasant sensation, a sense of confusion, of disorder, of wild and meaningless uproar. The man was tall and gaunt, as haggard as his auditor himself; a thin black beard covered half of his face, and one could see only two black hollows where the eyes were. He was speaking rapidly, in great excitement; he used many gestures—he spoke he moved here and ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... great personage drive up in a magnificent carriage. A dread foreboding seized him. Dull stupefaction, and thoughts scurrying like mice, vague terror, and the numbness of expectation and the weight of crushed tears in his heavy-laden breast, on his lips the forced, empty smile, and a meaningless ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... thing that gave her comfort, and the next she slackened the strings and let it back upon her neck, in a passion at it for making her too hot. Her talk was a wild, somewhat weird, farrago of utterly meaningless balderdash, mere inarticulate gabble, snatches of old Jacobite ballads and exaggerated phrases from the drama, to which she suited equally exaggerated action. She "babbled of green fields" and Highland glens; she prophesied "the drawing of the claymore," with a lofty ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... they walked off together into the darkness. The music grew fainter behind them. Some of the higher notes faded out altogether. Jenny's drumming and the steady sawing of the bass throbbed on, tuneless and meaningless in their ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... all moral schools agree. It is only in the lonely emergencies of life that our creed is tested: then routine maxims fail, and we fall back on our gods. It cannot then be said that the question, Is this a moral world? is a meaningless and unverifiable question because it deals with something non-phenomenal. Any question is full of meaning to which, as here, contrary answers lead to contrary behavior. And it seems as if in answering such a question as this ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... some clear reason to the contrary, avoid the use of expressions that have been used so much that they are worn out and often almost meaningless. Such expressions as the following ones are not wrong, but are often used when they are both inappropriate ...
— Practical Grammar and Composition • Thomas Wood
... son; repent and do well while there is yet time, that at the dim end of ages thou mayest once more be gathered unto Me. Still, Harmachis, though thou seest Me not; still, when the very name by which thou knowest Me has become a meaningless mystery to those who shall be after thee; still I, whose hours are eternal—I, who have watched Universes wither, wane, and, beneath the breath of Time, melt into nothingness; again to gather, and, re-born, ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... expressions, for which the shaman can assign a meaning, but whose etymology cannot now be learned; and some embody obsolete words whose meaning is lost even to the priesthood. There are many vocables known to be meaningless and recited merely to fill out the rhythm or to give a dignified length to the song. For the same reasons a meaningless syllable is often added or a ...
— The Mountain Chant, A Navajo Ceremony • Washington Matthews
... perhaps less subject to the restraints of associated ideas and of use with particular vessels or in definite relations to other features of the vessel. At the same time it is manifest that these painted figures are not all merely meaningless decorations, but that many, throughout all degrees of modification, refer with greater or less clearness to natural originals, to ideas associated with these originals, or to the relationship of these originals to the vessel and ...
— Ancient art of the province of Chiriqui, Colombia • William Henry Holmes
... sir, he doesn't conduct at all. His orchestra pays no attention to him, and plays in spite of the absurd and meaningless passes which he ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 17, July 23, 1870 • Various
... so much in the written and spoken language of modern Europe, that it is the best language to take as a second language; in our own written and book language, above all, it fills so large a part that we perhaps hardly know how much of their reading falls meaningless upon the eye and ear of children in our elementary schools, from their total ignorance of either Latin or a modern language derived from it. For the little of languages that can be taught in our elementary schools, it is far better to go to the root at once; and Latin, besides, is the best ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... mere banalities of criticism; and I can never hear them without a suspicion that a professor of aesthetics is trying to hoodwink me by a bit of technical platitude. The cant phrases which have been used so often by panegyrists too lazy to define their terms, have become almost as meaningless as the ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... radiating from a small circle, and curiously crossing a larger circle some distance from the smaller. Unfortunately the spaces between the trefoils and the outer mouldings have been filled up with plaster and the lights themselves subdivided with meaningless wood tracery to hold the horrible blue-and-red glass now so popular in Portugal. Though Santa Maria dos Olivaes cannot be nearly as old as has usually been believed, it is one of the earliest churches built on the plan derived perhaps ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... analysis, I have treated content and form separately. But I am keenly aware that the divorce of the two is what has made our stories for children so unsatisfactory. We have good ideas told without charm of design; and we have meaningless patterns which tickle the ear for the moment but fade because they spring from no real thought. Literature is only achieved when the thought pattern and the language pattern exactly fit. A refrain for the mere sake of recurrent jingle, that has no genuine no essential ...
— Here and Now Story Book - Two- to seven-year-olds • Lucy Sprague Mitchell
... trouble of acquiring it. Of woman as a real human being, with sexual needs and sexual responsibilities, morality has often known nothing. It has been content to preach restraint to man, an abstract and meaningless restraint even if it were possible. But when we have regard to the actual facts of life, we can no longer place virtue in a vacuum. Women are just as apt as men to be afflicted by the petty jealousies and narrownesses of the crude sexual impulse; women just as much as men need the perpetual sublimation ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... began to make out the faces of the sailors. An oily-skinned Greek squatted on the bunk to his left. To his right was a Chinaman, marvelously emaciated; his lips pulled back in a continual smile, meaningless, like the ...
— Harrigan • Max Brand
... faith?—that the "asking" is not credentialed by the "believing?" When the anointed minister of Heaven spreads his palms and uprolls his eyes to beseech a general blessing or some special advantage is he the celebrant of a hollow, meaningless rite, or the dupe of a false promise? One does not know, but if one is not a fool one does know that his every resultless petition proves him by the inexorable laws of logic to be the ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... dresses must have to give them up, and get new black ones, and that often at the very moment when they're just deprived of the aid of their only support and bread-winner. I wonder it doesn't occur to them that this is absolutely wrong, and that they oughtn't to prefer the meaningless fetich ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... nothing but what was set down for them. Naturally he was compelled to write cadenzas for them as elaborate and effective as those which they had been in the habit of improvising, so that much of his Italian music sounds empty and meaningless to our ears. But he introduced the thin edge of the wedge, and although even to the days of Jenny Lind singers were occasionally permitted to interpolate cadenzas of their own, the old tradition that an opera was merely an opportunity for the display ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... I myself knew was that from his fifteenth year upwards he had been known as an imbecile who went barefooted both in winter and summer, visited convents, gave little images to any one who cared to take them, and spoke meaningless words which some people took for prophecies; that nobody remembered him as being different; that at, rare intervals he used to call at Grandmamma's house; and that by some people he was said to be the outcast son of rich parents and a pure, saintly soul, ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy
... in the Upani@sads any elaborate philosophical discussions, or subtle analysis of mind. It comes there as a matter of direct perception, and the conviction with which the truth has been grasped cannot fail to impress the readers. That out of the apparently meaningless speculations of the Brahma@nas this doctrine could have developed, might indeed appear to be too improbable ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... example, or Hedda Gabler, no doubt most of the dialogue would be given right at the back of the stage, out of ear-shot of the audience. In ordinary dramas the Villain who may have to use strong language, or in farce the Eccentric Comedian who frequently has to utter more or less playfully a meaningless "big big D," would by Imperial command be compelled to "retire up" to deliver himself of the expletive, and then would have to "come down to the front" and continue the stage-business. But, not satisfied with merely giving the above stage-directions, His Imperial Majesty "est alle samedi s'assurer ...
— Punch, Or the London Charivari, Volume 101, November 21, 1891 • Various
... she forswore all words as empty lies; What speech could help, encourage, or repair? Yet when she meets these grave, indulgent eyes, Fulfilled with pity, simplest words are fair, Caressing, meaningless, that do not dare To compensate or mend, but merely soothe With ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... sermons. But, that night as they walked home together, something made Dan feel that his friend was pleased. The encounter with the blunt young farmer had been so refreshing that he was not so depressed in spirit as he commonly was after the perfunctory, meaningless, formal compliments, and handshaking that usually closed his services. Perhaps because of this he—for the first time—sought an expression from ...
— The Calling Of Dan Matthews • Harold Bell Wright
... defaced for some pages by incoherent and meaningless ravings. It seemed as if one of his dark fits of frenzy had at that time come over the writer. At length, in a more firm and clear character than that immediately preceding it, ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... waxy cylinders. "We'll see how the General likes music," he proclaimed. He slipped the cylinder over a projection, and wound the mechanism. A sharp, high scratching responded, as painful as a pin dragging over the ear drum, a meaningless cacophony of sounds that gradually resolved into a thin, incredibly metallic melody which appeared, mercifully, to come from a distance. To this was presently joined a voice, the voice, as it were, of a sinister, tin manikin galvanized ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... the thing is impossible. She would remember, and I should remember also, when our sons grew up and had to meet the world with the brand of our name upon their faces. Look at Rex. He is my best friend. Yesterday I learnt that he is my cousin. Even he has hidden his father's deeds under a common, meaningless name. How much more should I hide my head! How much less right have I, than he had yesterday, to make an innocent girl, or any woman, the wife of a Greifenstein! No—go to Hilda, tell her the truth, let me see her once, and I will rid you of myself when I have said good-bye. You are her ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... they knew not for what, which dulled the thoughts and stilled the tongues of the small company at the table, soon communicated itself to the stewards. The men stood in little knots, exchanging few words, and those mostly meaningless; but the chief steward, whose trained ear caught the regular beat of the donkey-engine, woke them up with a series ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... centuries. The first perfectly simple in manufacture, trusting wholly to beauty of design, and the play of light on the naturally woven surface, while the latter eke out their gaudy feebleness with spots and ribs and long floats, and all kinds of meaningless tormenting of the web, till there is nothing to be learned ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... that fondness meant. He had returned to find her married, and severed from him forever, at least in this life. When he found that he had lost her he began to understand how dear she was. All life stood before him aimless, pointless, and meaningless without her. He came back, but the old intercourse could not be renewed; she could not be his, and he could only live, and love, and endure. Perhaps it would have been wiser if he had at once left Holby and sought out some other abode. But the discovery ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... "gone through a large number of facts. Of these there is not one that does not go directly to the proof of poisoning, and that can only be explained on the supposition of poisoning; whereas, if the theory of the defence be admitted, all these facts, from the first to the last, become meaningless and absurd. They can only be refuted by arguments or explanations that are childish ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... Bergson, consistently anti-Socratic and discrediting analytical intellect, insists that whatever unity may be had must come through instinct, not analysis. He refuses to recognize Plato's One in the Many, sees the whole universe as "a perpetual gushing forth of novelties," a universal and meaningless flux. Surrender to this eternal flux, he appears to say, and then we shall gain reality. So he relies on impulse, instinct, his elan vital, which means, I take it, on man's subrational emotions. We ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... the two separate averments in the second chapter of Genesis, both entirely meaningless apart from the construction we here give it, that "out of the ground made the Lord God to grow" the vegetation of the earth, and "out of the ground" produced he (or caused to be produced) every beast of the field, etc.,—all of which has a definite and comprehensive ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... Girtham,' or 'The Glaring Girl of Glittering Girtham.' O Alliteration! Alliteration! what crimes have been wrought in thy name! Little dost thou think of the mischief thou hast done, flooding the world with meaningless titles and absurd phrases. How canst thou talk of 'Lyrics of Loneliness,' 'Soliloquies of Song,' 'Pearls of the Peerage'? Why dost thou stay thine hand? We long for thee to enrich the world with 'Dreams of a Dotard,' the ...
— The Romance of Mathematics • P. Hampson
... the theme "a toi" would return like the refrain of a song to which he found himself keeping step; but the words sometimes became meaningless; for in the merciful way that nature has, the impulse of self-preservation so occupied his mind that he had scarcely leisure ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... sensualist who called his greed piety. Stuart Farquaharson sat in a chilled inertia of despair while the ship's bells recorded the passing of hours. From the decks above drifted little fragments of human talk and human laughter, but to him they were meaningless. Late in the evening he rose with an effort and went on deck where he sought out an unoccupied place. Phosphorescent gleams broke luminously in the wake. Clusters of great stars and the bright dust of star-spray sprinkled ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... the value of which it is impossible to estimate to-day. Such of his sermons as are still extant are prosy, long-winded, dogmatic absurdities, overloaded with periphrastic illustrations in scriptural language. They are meaningless to a degree, which would make one wonder at the docility and patience of a seventeenth century congregation, if one had not witnessed a similar spirit in congregations ...
— The Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54 • Edward Abbott Parry
... this meant that he would come with his army at his back, it was an absurd proposal. If it meant that he would come alone, it was a falsehood. In either case it was a device to fritter away time. [Sidenote: Sulla's astuteness and superstition.] For all the while that he was bandying meaningless messages he continued his onward march. He had sacrificed, and the soothsayer Postumius, when he saw the entrails, had stretched out his hands to him, and offered to be kept in chains for punishment after the battle if it was not a victory. He, too, had himself seen a vision of good omen. ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... the man who had thrown all considerations of duty and feeling to the winds as so much lumber, so much meaningless conventionality, felt as shocked and disgusted as ever he could have done in his most foolish days, what time illusions were as vivid, as golden as ever. But, remembering himself, he replied ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... and looked at his guests with a meaningless stare. While they laughed he was reciting to himself the old story: "Dain dead, all my plans destroyed. This is the end of all hope and of all things." His heart sank within him. He felt ...
— Almayer's Folly - A Story of an Eastern River • Joseph Conrad
... other piece of evidence. A refined face may be refuted by clumsy finger-ends; the eyes may contradict the voice; the gait may nullify the smile. None of the phenomena which every individual carelessly and brazenly displays in every motor-bus terrorising the streets of London is meaningless or negligible. ...
— The Author's Craft • Arnold Bennett
... about her stateroom setting in order the books, magazines, flowers, and candy, with which Banneker had sought to fortify her against the tedium of the trip. As the time for departure drew near, they fell into and effortfully maintained that meaningless, banal, and jerky talk which is the inevitable concomitant of long partings between people who, really caring for each other, can find nothing but commonplaces wherewith to ease their stress of mind. Miss Van Arsdale's common sense came to ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... I saw him press hard with his thumb on the upper end of the metal contrivance. From the other end, just concealed under his little linger, there shot out as if released by a magic spring a thin keen little blade of the brightest and toughest steel. He was holding, instead of a meaningless contrivance of four rings, a most dangerous kind of stiletto or dagger upraised. He lifted his thumb and the blade sprang back into its sheath like an extinguished ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... those lines are so far in advance of those of his party that he was obliged, for reasons of political expediency and party exigency, to hold them in abeyance during the Presidential campaign of 1908. Jeffersonian democracy, therefore, seems now to be nothing more than a meaningless ...
— The Facts of Reconstruction • John R. Lynch
... and earthquake, with gold Eldorados and Mahometan Paradises for the reward. Ah me, into what waste latitudes, in this Time-Voyage, have we wandered; like adventurous Sindbads;—where the men go about as if by galvanism, with meaningless glaring eyes, and have no soul, but only a beaver-faculty and stomach! The haggard despair of Cotton-factory, Coal-mine operatives, Chandos Farm-labourers, in these days, is painful to behold; but not so painful, hideous to the inner sense, as that brutish godforgetting Profit-and-Loss Philosophy ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... earlier crusade. "I was born," says Metternich in the fragment of his autobiography, "to be the enemy of the Revolution." Nature, indeed, and the environment of his youth had formed him to act the part of the genius of Reaction. Beneath the fine, empty, meaningless mask of the Austrian noble lay a heart which had never quivered with any profound emotion, or beat high with any generous impulse. He was hostile to nobility of thought, action, and art, for he had intelligence enough to discern in these a living satire upon himself, his life, his aims. ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... to the little room with the red cross on its casement, wherein, although our prisoners were released, another term of nursing had already begun for her. In contrast with her life of cheerful self-abnegation, ours seemed selfish, meaningless, and empty. ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... high mountain," heard in the words then whispered in his ear a manifest call of Duty, and felt a Responsibility thrust upon him to secure the kingdoms of the earth for the Blessings of Liberty and the Bible by so small a sacrifice as making an apparently meaningless obeisance to Satan, yet we can certainly say that the world would now have been very different from what it is had He so done. And so in the case of the United States, though we cannot for a moment ...
— "Imperialism" and "The Tracks of Our Forefathers" • Charles Francis Adams
... the minds and souls of one another, there to deposit a judgment or a sympathy, or whatever our nature suggests at sight of our neighbor's failings. In obeying such an impulse one can easily peer through the conventional veil which screens such phases of human character under the meaningless appellations of "Blues," or "Indisposition." They are truly the visible effect of a secret hidden cause, which is sometimes brought to the surface by the magnetic power of one who has studied human faces and characters. So, en passant, it may be as well to kindly suggest to such "blue" friends ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... which the lower types of men show us a smaller departure from reflex action than do the higher types, is their strong tendency to mimic the motions and sounds made by others—an almost involuntary habit which travellers find it difficult to check. This meaningless repetition, which seems to imply that the idea of an observed action cannot be framed in the mind of the observer without tending forthwith to discharge itself in the action conceived (and every ideal action is a nascent form of ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... now; it would become indistinct. How gentle he was, and how different from Henry! "Nancy!" he repeated. Then the root became altogether blurred and meaningless, and she felt him take her in his arms and kiss her. "Darling Nancy," he was saying; and, somehow, to her great relief, she found ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... pastures; this gruesome thing mounted upon a forked stick, its empty eye-sockets and ears filled with twigs and dried grasses, was sufficiently pagan and horrible to demand an entirely unique form of worship, and this Priscilla proceeded to evolve. She invented weird words, meaningless but high-sounding; she propitiated her idol with wild dances and an abandon of restraint. Before it she had moments of strange silence when, with wonder-filled eyes, she waited for suggestion and impression ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... in our new cabin in West Virginia, I induced my mother to get hold of a book for me. How or where she got it I do not know, but in some way she procured an old copy of Webster's "blue-back" spelling-book, which contained the alphabet, followed by such meaningless words as "ab," "ba," "ca," "da." I began at once to devour this book, and I think that it was the first one I ever had in my hands. I had learned from somebody that the way to begin to read was to learn the alphabet, so I tried in all ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... face of a simpleton, and that was very funny upon papa,—such a transformation! A spectacled old beldame, looking exactly like a terrific auld wife at Lenox, was very diverting upon Julian, turning him into a gnome; and Una was irresistible beneath the mask of a meaningless young miss, resembling a silly-looking doll. Julian put on another with a portentous nose, and then danced the schottische with Una in her doll's mask. Hearing this morning that a gentleman had sent ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... spent the greater part of the morning with the new heiress, and Lydia had listened, speechless, as he recited a long and meaningless list of securities, of estates, of ground rents, balances and the ...
— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace
... which he had no inkling before. Sent him away with the notes of a melody floating through his brain, so that the merry laugh of his children will be a discord, and such a memory of a soft glance, that his wife's bright look will be meaningless.' ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... consequence of which the French nation lost from ten to twenty million francs. And even the letters and telegrams that were actually passed were so carelessly handled that many of them were lost on the way or delayed until they became meaningless to the addressee. So, for instance, an official letter despatched by the Minister of Commerce to the Minister of Finance in Paris was sent to Calcutta, where the French Consul-General came across it, and ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... she was slowly becoming inured; but the strangeness of her life she could not yet comprehend—its meaningless days and nights, its dragging hours—and the strange people around her immersed in their sordid pleasures—this woman—her husband's sister, thin-lipped, hard-featured, drinking, smoking, gambling, shrill in disputes, merciless of speech, venomously ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... back into favour and office, appealed to the Senate, only seven days after the execution, to establish hereditary power as the only means of ending the plots against Napoleon's life; for, as the opportunist Jacobins argued, if the hereditary system were adopted, conspiracies to murder would be meaningless, when, even if they struck down one man, they must fail to shatter the system that ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... words in any given language; for instance, of e's and t's, tion and ed, a, and, and the in English. Now it is perfectly easy to introduce abbreviations for each of the common short words and terminations, and equally easy to baffle the decipherer's reliance thereon by inserting meaningless symbols to separate the words; by employing two signs for a common letter, or so arranging your cipher that no one shall without extreme difficulty know which marks stand for single and which for several combined letters, where one ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... a rather meaningless, dreary town, one of thousands of such towns in Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Kansas, Iowa, but her ...
— Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories • Sherwood Anderson
... her story and to tell her that she had done right. But she had no one to talk to. She had lost her mother long before; she thought her father a queer man, and could not talk to him seriously. He worried her with his whims, his extreme readiness to take offence, and his meaningless gestures; and as soon as one began to talk to him, he promptly turned the conversation on himself. And in her prayer she was not perfectly open, because she did not know for certain what she ...
— The Darling and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... generally and not merely among the Romans, the principal name; and the distinctive individual name, the -praenomen-, became subordinate. It seems as if the small and ever diminishing number and the meaningless character of the Italian, and particularly of the Roman, individual names, compared with the luxuriant and poetical fulness of those of the Greeks, were intended to illustrate the truth that it was characteristic ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... and find you again; I could not depart from France without finding and thanking you for all your kindness. In truth I am glad you came, for——." I tried to say more, but the words left my lips sounding so cold and meaningless the sentence ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... then the taboo enforced by a Morals Police is, perhaps, as good a way as any of gaining a fictitious sense of activity. But the ideal of "annihilation" becomes an irrelevant and meaningless phrase. If lust is deeply rooted in men and its only expression is evil, I for one should recommend a faith in the millennium. You can put this Paradise at the beginning of the world or the end of it. Practical difference there ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... ripening for pension on the shelf of General Duty is an object at once pitiful and ludicrous. His profession has ebbed away from him, and he lies a melancholy derelict on the shore, with sails flapping idly against the mast and meaningless pennants streaming in ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... soul, but the midge would see no beauty in those features because it had not the soul to enter into the soul of the man and understand the expression on his face. All the little shades and gradations and tones and lights in the features of the man would be quite meaningless to the midge because it would know nothing of the man's soul, of which the features and the changes and variations in them were the outward manifestation. The midge would know nothing of the reality of the man which lay hidden behind ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... severity to parade. We acknowledge a successful compromise between the austerity of the order and the grandeur befitting the fame, wealth, prestige, and power of its parent foundation. The church itself is a tolerable structure of the Renaissance—costly marble incrustations and mosaics, meaningless Neapolitan frescoes. One singular episode in the mediocrity of art adorning it, is the tomb of Pietro de' Medici. Expelled from Florence in 1494, he never returned, but was drowned in the Garigliano. Clement VII. ordered, and Duke Cosimo I. erected, this marble monument—the handicraft, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... he is a strange one. How different he is from what I thought! I don't believe there's another in this place who could have written such a letter. What would a New York society man, whose compliments are as extravagant as meaningless, think of it? Truly he doesn't know the world, and isn't like it. I supposed him an awkward, eccentric young countryman, that, from his very verdancy, would be difficult to manage, and he writes to me like a knight of olden time, only such language seems Quixotic in our day. The foolish ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... unnecessary because the most obvious criticism of the contention before us disposes of the proof upon which it is sought to be based. Nevertheless, of course, though the particular contention about the size of the family must necessarily be meaningless, unless, as is so very improbable, it should be shown some day that the bearing of children affects the maternal organism in some way so as to cause subsequent children to approximate ever nearer to the type of the race; yet it is quite ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... 1405. I follow Dietrich in reading edniowe self-renewing, for the meaningless ...
— Genesis A - Translated from the Old English • Anonymous
... might then have a series of fern-patterns which would each contain points of distinctive interest and beauty, and of scientific truth, and yet be variable by fancy, with quite as much ease as the meaningless Indian one. Similarly, there is no form of leaf, of flower, or of insect, which might not become suggestive to you, and expressible in terms of manufacture, so as to be interesting, and ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... previous chapter. It would seem to be another example of this rather fundamental tendency of the stupor reaction, not merely to diminish conative reactions in general, but to reduce their appearance to that of isolated, partial and therefore rather meaningless expression. ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... entertained the noblest ideas on the constitution of the universe, and had sacrificed to the true God in the most ancient temple of the earth. According to Maigrot, Navarette, on the contrary, and even according to the Jesuit Longobardi, the adoration of the Chinese was addressed to inanimate tablets, meaningless inscriptions, or, in the best case, to coarse ancestral spirits and beings without intelligence.[2] If we believe the former, the ancient deism of China approached the purity of the Christian religion; if we listen to the latter, the absurd fetichism of the multitude degenerated ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... half-romantic, and therefore not quite real. This relation, even while it has ceased to exist more and more in fact, has still continued to express itself aesthetically; and in art it has become a mere obsolete nuisance. One may care nothing for art and yet long to be rid of the meaningless frivolities of our domestic art. One may wish to clear them away as so much litter and trash; and this clearance is necessary so that we may purge our vision and see what is beautiful. We are almost ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... invitations from white persons. He always claimed that he could best satisfy his social desires among his own people. He believed that the question of so-called "social equality" between the races was too academic and meaningless to be worthy ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... in the mountain a-hunting. He repeated the song which he had been singing, and the wind as it swirled about the house must have caught his voice and carried it far. It was a song chronicling the deeds of the Great Bear, and had a meaningless refrain, "Eeon-a, Ha-hoo-jah! Eeon-a, Ha-hoo-jah!" But when he reached the advent upon the scene of the secondary hero, the Great Bear himself, very polite, speaking excellent Cherokee ("since ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... his father commenced to give him instruction. His activity as a composer commenced when he could scarcely read, for before he was five years old he showed his father a manuscript of a violin concerto which at first the father took to be mere meaningless marks, but on having them explained by the boy he found there was indeed a musical idea and, of course, ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... early, and May Bartram sat, for the first time in the year, without a fire; a fact that, to Marcher's sense, gave the scene of which she formed part a smooth and ultimate look, an air of knowing, in its immaculate order and cold meaningless cheer, that it would never see a fire again. Her own aspect—he could scarce have said why—intensified this note. Almost as white as wax, with the marks and signs in her face as numerous and as fine as if they had been etched ...
— The Beast in the Jungle • Henry James
... trains. But all the ordinary interests in life, all the things that busily and contentedly occupied his day, one only excepted, had become without savour. A dozen times in the morning he would sit down to his piano, only to find that he could not think it worth while to make his hands produce these meaningless tinkling sounds, and he would jump up to read the paper over again, or watch for fresh headlines to appear on the boards of news-vendors in the street, and send out for any fresh edition. Or he would walk round to his club and spend an hour reading the tape news ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... to be avoided is monotony in colour. Who can not recall barren rooms, without a spark of attraction despite priceless treasures, dispersed in a meaningless way? That sort of setting puts a blight on any gathering. "Well," you will ask, "given the task of converting such a sterile stretch of monotony into a blooming joy, how should one begin?" It is quite simple. Picture to yourself how the room would look if you scattered flowers about ...
— The Art of Interior Decoration • Grace Wood
... for spiritual exercises of all sorts,—"manuals of drill," so to speak, or "field tactics" for souls. Of these sorts of books, the good and the bad are almost indistinguishable from each other, except by the carefulest attention and the finest insight; overwrought, unnatural atmosphere and meaningless, shallow routine so nearly counterfeit the sound and shape of warm, true enthusiasm ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... They did not cheat, though Frank was ready if Bud had led him that way. Frank was ready for anything that Bud suggested. He drank when Bud drank, went from the first saloon to the one farther down and across the street, returned to the first with cheerful alacrity and much meaningless laughter when Bud signified a desire to change. It soothed Bud and irritated him by turns, this ready acquiescence of Frank's. He began to take a malicious delight in testing that acquiescence. He began to try whether he could not find the end of Frank's endurance in staying ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... paper is about six inches long and two inches wide. He also puts printed or written papers in a machine which is run like a clock. Well, this is an easy way to say prayers. And are there not many prayers offered, not merely by Chinamen, that are machine prayers, soulless, heartless, meaningless, and faithless, and which bring no answer? But how simple, how beautiful, how sublime, the golden Prayer which the Divine Master taught His disciples! Lord, teach us how to pray. If the noble Liturgy of the Church is properly rendered,—for it is the expansion ...
— By the Golden Gate • Joseph Carey
... brought again to light, and excite as much marvel and inquiry as any mysterious building of old, the purpose of which we do not understand, and the use of which we cannot now account for. They will be seemingly as meaningless as any lonely cairn, isolated broken piece of wall, or solitary fragment of a building, of which no principal part remains, and which puzzles us to account ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian |
