"Nonentity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... heroical; Troy Town was probably not a more heroic business; and this belongs to thee, to thy own people,—must it be dead forever?—Perhaps yes,—and kill me too into the bargain. Really I think it very shocking that we run to Greece, to Italy, to &c., &c., and leave all at home lying buried as a nonentity. Were I absolute Sovereign and Chief Pontiff here, there should be a study of the Old English ages first of all. I will pit Odin against any Jupiter of them; find Sea-kings that would have given Jason a Roland for his Oliver! We are, as you sometimes say, a book-ridden ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... these girls in the market-place, against Ottima in her guilt, and Phene who is as yet a nonentity (her speech to the sculptor is too plainly Browning's analysis of the moment, not her own thinking—no girl of fourteen brought up by Natalia would talk in that fashion) is set Pippa, the light, life and love of the day, ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... is opportunity to the man who can't use it? An undefecundated egg, which the waves of time wash away into nonentity. So, as my memory is ill-furnished, and my notebook still worse, I am unable to show myself either erudite or eloquent apropos of the calumny whereof the Rev. Amos Barton was the victim. I can only ask my reader,—did you ever upset your ink-bottle, and watch, in helpless agony, the rapid ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... of some kind has always been necessary in the world, my friend," said the Professor calmly; "Either in the shape of a deity or a king. A wood and straw Nonentity is better than an incarnated fleshly Selfishness. Will you give me supper ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... war; as Treasurer of the Navy he managed its finances, and, as President of the India Board, he sought to control the affairs of that Empire. As for the War Office, it was a petty office, controlled by a nonentity, Sir Charles Yonge, who was soon to ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... the reason I have given should be enough. Yes, aunt, there is another motive—do not laugh at my folly, that I cannot dwarf myself and become a helpless nonentity, without a struggle to grasp the blessings so much desired by other men. It has been a happy time that I have known at the Old Homestead, still what has it secured to me but unrest, and such disquiet as will follow me through life, unless I work out ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... hand; and as mamma was helped in, Mary Waters, who was sitting inside, flung her arms round her, and then round the girls; and the Doctor, who acted footman, jumped on the box, and off they went; taking no more notice of ME than if I'd been a nonentity. ...
— The Fatal Boots • William Makepeace Thackeray
... a Body as possible. His chief wish is to turn over on the other side and sleep for another seven hours or so, but one of those people is standing respectfully beside his bed and though Oliver blinks eyes at him reproachfully, he will not vanish back into his proper nonentity—he remains standing there—obsequious words come ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... detractors. His book is admittedly one of the most living books in existence. That life can have come from no one but the author. It is the irrefutable proof of his genius. Life and power do not issue, here any more than elsewhere, out of folly and nonentity. The Life of Johnson is the result of the most intimate and fertile union between biographer and his subject which has ever occurred, and it gives us in consequence more of the essence of both than any other biography. Boswell brought ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... an effigy of man—an embodiment of matter, and an evolution of force. If we interrogate it respecting the destiny of the soul, it demands of us what has become of the flame when it is blown out, and in what condition it was before the taper was lighted. Was it a nonentity? Has it been annihilated? It admits that the idea of personality which has deluded us through life may not be instantaneously extinguished at death, but may be lost by slow degrees. On this is founded the doctrine of transmigration. But at length ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... to denote the nonentity or absence of a thing, as well as its reality; as, nothing, naught, ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham
... Self-consciousness, ceasing its vain quest (vain in both senses) for the separate domination of life, surrenders itself back again into the arms of the Mother-consciousness from which it originally sprang—surrenders itself back, not to be merged in nonentity, but to be affiliated in loving dependence on and ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... tremble! The powers that emanate from the glittering wonder are as terrible as they are unnatural. The magic spell exerted by the beaker has transformed the heroic son of Herakles, the more than mortal, into the whimpering coward, the crushed, broken nonentity I found upon the galley's deck. You are silent? Your nimble tongue finds no reply. How could you have forgotten that you aided me to win the wager which forced Antony to gaze into the beaker before I filled it for him? How grateful I was to Anubis when he finally consented ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... is a wide diversity in human beings ranging from herculean physical strength to pitiable weakness; from the mental power of genius to the nonentity of imbecility; from outstanding and unquestionable talent in arts and letters to illiteracy and clumsy inefficiency. This wide diversity in human capacity is one of the outstanding features of human nature, recorded again and again in history and encountered ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... to the Supreme Power, the Author of Life.... Afterwards the cult became depraved. Religion became a pretext for libertinism." Poets wrote facetious and salacious epigrams and affixed them to the statues of the god—even the greatest writers lending their pens to the "sport"—and eventually some nonentity collected these scattered verses and made them into a book. Everybody knows Catullus's contribution, ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... we say that a poet praises the whole creation, we commonly mean only that he praises the whole cosmos. But this sort of poet does really praise creation, in the sense of the act of creation. He praises the passage or transition from nonentity to entity; there falls here also the shadow of that archetypal image of the bridge, which has given to the priest his archaic and mysterious name. The mystic who passes through the moment when there is nothing but God does in some sense behold the beginningless beginnings ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... to defy his evil insolence to do its worst, and leaving the place at an hour's notice, to sail away to protection, or, if she chose to remain in England, to surround herself with a bodyguard of the people in whose eyes his disrepute relegated a man such as Nigel Anstruthers to powerless nonentity. Alone, she could have smiled and turned her back upon him. But she was here to take care of Rosy. She occupied a position something like that of a woman who remains with a man and endures outrage because she cannot ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... — N. inexistence^; nonexistence, nonsubsistence; nonentity, nil; negativeness &c adj.; nullity; nihility^, nihilism; tabula rasa [Lat.], blank; abeyance; absence &c 187; no such thing &c 4; nonbeing, nothingness, oblivion. annihilation; extinction &c (destruction) 162; extinguishment, extirpation, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... the reigning head and his consort in the policy which was jeopardizing the dynasty. But the Czar's political blindness was incurable. In a kind of panic he got rid of every remaining progressive minister; a nonentity of no importance from the Czar's personal circle was made prime minister, and the real power fell to Protopopoff, the strong man of the "dark forces," who was to see their designs through, but was the ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... because being now used to the duties, and somewhat experienced therein, I could take all the necessary part of the trouble off your lordship's hands, and so render the provostry in your lordship's name a perfect nonentity." Whereupon, he was pleased to say, if I would do so, and he commended my talents and prudence, he would have no objection to be made the provost at the ensuing election. Something more explicit might have ensued at that time; but Bailie M'Lucre and Mr Sharpset, who was the dean of guild, had been ...
— The Provost • John Galt
... pay the minister's salary, furnish the edifice, support social movements that would tend to increase membership, and sustain the religious services; but, were she a machine, minus brains, choice, or will, she could be no more completely a nonentity when the pastor was to be chosen, the amount of his salary fixed, or any matters of ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... said Miss Anna, trying to make the most of the compliment, "I am nobody at all, just a mere nonentity, Harriet." ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen
... and always asked God's blessing on his food, as if it were a kind of general sauce. He never prayed God to make him love his neighbor, or help him to be an honest man. He "had worship" every morning, no doubt; but only a Nonentity like his God could care for such prayers as his. George rejected his father's theology as false in logic and cruel in character: George knew just enough of God to be guilty of ...
— The Elect Lady • George MacDonald
... nonentity; in the resources which enrich and glorify the time of peace she was a bankrupt. Fine arts or education she had none: these centred in Athens. These were elements of progress, and could no more be tolerated ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... So Moses was sent for, post-haste, to intercede with the Almighty. His piety, it was felt, would command attention. For an average of three hundred and sixty-two days a year Moses was a miserable worm, a nonentity, but on the other three, when death threatened to visit Malka or her little clan, Moses became a personage of prime importance, and was summoned at all hours of the day and night to wrestle with the angel Azrael. When the angel had retired, ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... certain form in the middle of a circle made on the turf. The master of the gang commenced, and after much stamping with his foot, and the gentleman warmly exhorting him to cry aloud, like the roaring of a lion, he endeavoured to call forth nonentity into existence. Asking him if he could do it, he answered, "I am not strong enough." They were all asked the same question, which received the same answer. The visitor commenced. Every eye was fixed upon him, eager ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... began to find his position at home far from agreeable. His father had sunk into a mere nonentity through his mother's superior energy. Hence, in her hands rested the happiness or misery of all connected with the household. It soon became evident that her grand project was to effect a marriage between Lady Elizabeth Plympton and Herbert; and when ...
— Tales for Young and Old • Various
... went, having swept thousands of souls into eternity, and hundreds of thousands of pounds into nonentity. Lifeboats had not been invented. Harbours of refuge were almost unknown, and although our coasts bristled with dangerous reefs and headlands, lighthouses were few and far between. The consequence was, that wrecks were ...
— The Lighthouse • R.M. Ballantyne
... wild cattle. Men hanker after pain, anger, hate, the flush of passion, sudden flight, and breathless suspense, and they appeal to the artist as the conjurer of this demoniacal host. In the spiritual economy of our cultured classes art has become a spurious or ignominious and undignified need—a nonentity or a something evil. The superior and more uncommon artist must be in the throes of a bewildering nightmare in order to be blind to all this, and like a ghost, diffidently and in a quavering voice, he goes ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... creation to materialism, the doctrines of right and wrong to expediency, and immutable truths to a popular system of question and answer. Like the generality of sophists, he took away a received truth, and left nothing to supply its place; he reasoned falsehood into probability, truth into nonentity. ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... when the father of this girl (a child at that time) died- -of sheer helplessness; no other disorder—and then He renewed the acquaintance that had once subsisted between the mother and Him. He had been put aside for the flaxen-haired, large-eyed man (or nonentity) with Money. He could overlook that for Money. He wanted ...
— The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices • Charles Dickens
... ridicule.—"At least, let us be affectionate in public," ought to be the maxim of a married establishment. For both the married couple to lose honor, esteem, consideration, respect and all that is worth living for in society, is to become a nonentity. ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... of—oh,—ah,—yes! the other a lady in a white cashmere, leaning on his shoulder.—The ingenuous reader will understand that this was an internal, private, personal, subjective diorama, seen for one instant on the background of my own consciousness, and abolished into black nonentity by the first question which recalled me to actual life, as suddenly as if one of those iron shop-blinds (which I always pass at dusk with a shiver, expecting to stumble over some poor but honest shop-boy's head, just ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... over the malachite bowls of white roses to the place where Mrs. O'Rane was leaning forward with one elbow on the table and her other hand repressing Gaymer. The cast of the "Divorce" was being slightly changed, and they had thought it worth while to venture a sovereign on the name of one nonentity who was retiring in favour of another. Eric adjudicated in Gaymer's favour and was turning to give Barbara a last chance, when he found that the flood-gates were open and that every one, taking his time from Lady Poynter, was prepared to discuss ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... always mesh. The college athlete may discover that the only use the world has for talented shoulder muscles is for hod-carrying purposes. The society fashion plate may never get the hang of how to earn anything but last year's model pants; and the fishy-eyed nonentity, who never did anything more glorious in college than pay his class tax, may be doing a brokerage business in skyscrapers ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... stroke of good luck that he scarcely deserved. He died without a moment's pain, with a merry thought in his head, perhaps, while many another better man has to linger in torture for weeks. No, Bormann, the best I can say about Winkler is that his death makes one nonentity the less on earth." ...
— The Lamp That Went Out • Augusta Groner
... and if he is coming out as a genius he will be quite the style. There is one woman who could do the honors perfectly,—madame,—and she feels as if she could almost wring the life out of the small nonentity who has usurped her place, for of course Floyd would soon have cared for madame if ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... to hear the sham chauffeur talk. When things go well, he does it; when they go wrong, it is the fault of some one else; if he makes a successful run, the mechanic with him is a nonentity; if he breaks down, the mechanic is his only resource. It is more interesting to hear the mechanic—the real chauffeur —talk when he is flat on his back making good the mistakes of his master, but his ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... broncos, each neighing for his own bin; the Senate—four score portentous clubmen, adjusting the conservative shirt-front of dignity and moderation over the license of privilege and "the interests"; the Executive—dillydallying between nonentity and the Big Stick; the Supreme Court—a handful of citizens and participators in our common human nature, magically transmuted into omniscient and omnipotent gods by certificates of appointment! And the rest of our hundred millions, in this era of new discoveries and profound ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... begin at the beginning we must try to fall back on uninterpreted feeling, as the mystics aspire to do. We need not expect, however, to find peace there, for the immediate is in flux. Pure feeling rejoices in a logical nonentity very deceptive to dialectical minds. They often think, when they fall back on elements necessarily indescribable, that they have come upon true nothingness. If they are mystics, distrusting thought and craving ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... passionate grief, or dreary sense of irreparable loss, there was none in that manly heart. There were times when the widower reproached himself for this want of feeling; but in very truth Madame Lenoble, jeune, had lived and died a nonentity. Her departure left no empty place; even her children scarcely missed ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... in itself impossible, and that consequently the objects in space are mere products of the imagination. The dogmatical theory of idealism is unavoidable, if we regard space as a property of things in themselves; for in that case it is, with all to which it serves as condition, a nonentity. But the foundation for this kind of idealism we have already destroyed in the transcendental aesthetic. Problematical idealism, which makes no such assertion, but only alleges our incapacity to prove the existence of anything besides ourselves by means of immediate ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... realize that things are. Until we see the background of darkness we cannot admire the light as a single and created thing. As soon as we have seen that darkness, all light is lightening, sudden, blinding, and divine. Until we picture nonentity we underrate the victory of God, and can realize none of the trophies of His ancient war. It is one of the million wild jests of truth that we know ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... She heard one woman inquire who he was, and, receiving an answer, say quickly, "the Sir John Lanison, do you mean?" The interest displayed rather pleased Lady Bolsover, for surely fame, however obtained, was preferable to insignificance and nonentity. She therefore received her brother very graciously when he called on the following morning, and felt very contented that he should have chanced last night upon such a brilliant evening, and must realise how big a position his sister filled in the social world of London. ...
— The Brown Mask • Percy J. Brebner
... at him. So a coward could despise a coward! "My men were wise," I corrected. "With Simon killed there were only two men left,—one, rather, for Leclerc is a nonentity. Labarthe, left alone, was wise to surrender. He is skillful with Indians. Monsieur, tell me of your dealings with Pemaou. Tell me your trip here. I ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... Court House—nor the grove of broad elms, shrivelled and dusty—nor the enclosing quadrangle of somnolent, drooping farm horses. He was seeing this town shaken as by an explosion. He was seeing cataclysmic battle, with Blind Charlie become a nonentity, Blake completely annihilated, and himself victorious at the front. And, dream of his dreams! he was seeing himself free to reshape Westville ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... it is simply repairing the mechanical waste and renewing the chemical energy that will enable us to go on a little while and a little way farther); take out the time spent in sleep—in practical nonentity—and the remainder is a pitiful handful of years, so few, that to number them seems like a ...
— Christ, Christianity and the Bible • I. M. Haldeman
... up and down, revolving a new idea, a new phase of the business, that had flashed upon him. When he had his thoughts once more in form he turned toward the girl, the mere machine. He gazed at her in amazement. When he had last looked, he had seen an uninteresting nonentity. But that was not this person, seated before him in the same garments and with the same general blondness. That person had been a girl. This time the transformation was not into the sweet innocence of lovely childhood, but into something incredibly ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... wage of our first father's blame, Daughter of envy and nonentity, Serf of the serpent, and his harlotry, Thou beast most arrogant and void of shame! Thy last great conquest dost thou dare proclaim, Crying that all things are subdued to thee, Against the Almighty raised almightily?— The ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... an atrocious satisfaction. "He's nothing but a thief," she cried, "this father of yours. As to you I have never been deceived in you for a moment. I have been growing more and more sick of you for years. You are a vulgar, silly nonentity, and you shall go back to where you belong, whatever low place you have sprung from, and beg your bread—that is if anybody's charity will have anything to do with you, ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... with him easily, nor suffer him to sacrifice himself without making a desperate effort to hold him back. On the other hand, and for all Rex knew, Hilda might be a foolishly sentimental, half-frivolous nonentity, who would take offence at the first word which spoke of parting and consider herself insulted by Greif's chivalrous determination. She might be a suspicious girl, who would immediately be attacked ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... uprooted from Settlesham; and the girls had much hope, but he was too much out of spirits to be sanguine. He said that he should only hear a great deal of offensive stuff from Tomkins the brewer; and that, in the desire to displease nobody, the votes should settle down on some nonentity, was the best which was likely to happen. Thus, grumbling, he set off, and his daughters watched anxiously for his return. They saw him come through the garden with a quick, light step, that made them augur ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... has been at the works to-day," he said; and then, with a gesture of the hands and a shrug, he described Lord Ferriby as a nonentity. "He went through the works, and looked over your books. I wrote out a sort of certificate of his satisfaction with ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman
... in the existence of matter and evil, while Shelley so far refined upon the theory of Berkeley, as not only to resolve the whole of creation into spirit, but to add also to this immaterial system, some pervading principle, some abstract nonentity of love and beauty—of which, as a substitute at least for Deity—the philosophic bishop had ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... too modest," retorted Grace. "Come on, little Miss Nonentity, let's go to bed or I won't get up early enough to-morrow morning to see Mabel ...
— Grace Harlowe's First Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... subdivision of this problem. If one has trained one's eye to detect the symptoms of decline, one also understands morality,—one understands what lies concealed beneath its holiest names and tables of values: e.g., impoverished life, the will to nonentity, great exhaustion. Morality denies life.{HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS} In order to undertake such a mission I was obliged to exercise self-discipline:—I had to side against all that was morbid in myself including Wagner, including Schopenhauer, including the whole of ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... Tannhauser that winter. On the contrary, I felt an irresistible desire to withdraw into my shell and leave these gay surroundings into which, strangely enough, I had been introduced at the instigation of Hiller, whom I soon recognised as being a nonentity. I felt I must quickly compose something, as this was the only means of ridding myself of all the disturbing and painful excitement Tannhauser had ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... understood, so to be judged, and only so far to be credited. The mathematical he made, I say, exception of: number and measure he believed in to the extent of their significance, but that significance, he was never weary of reminding you, was slender to the verge of nonentity. Science was true, because it told us almost nothing. With a few abstractions it could deal, and deal correctly; conveying honestly faint truths. Apply its means to any concrete fact of life, and this high dialect of the wise became a ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... first obtained the Canadas, its commerce consisted of a few peltries, conveyed to France by the vessels which brought out the troops and carried back the disbanded regiments. The lumber trade was unknown. The importations were a nonentity. While at present many hundreds of vessels are engaged in the direct timber trade, and more than one hundred and fifty vessels have been frequently counted on the river St Lawrence. These, it must be remembered, are almost exclusively owned ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... see not the use of wasting so many words on him. While there is undoubted wisdom in winning to our side the man who controls the army, there seems to me little to gain in prolonging discussion with the Emperor, who is a nonentity at best, and has no following. The path to the throne must be cleared, and there is but one ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... him—Vance. The forgotten figure of Vance came up close—the watching eyes, the simulated interest, the feigned belief, the detective mental attitude, these broke through the grandiose panorama, bringing darkness. Vance, strong personality that hid behind assumed nonentity for some purpose of his own, intruded with sudden violence, demanding an explanation ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... dispersal—the broken fragments of the intelligible a watchful ear may pick out. Dr. Vereker won't have a cab; he will leave the 'cello till next time, and walk. Mr. Bradshaw wants to get to Bayswater. Of course, that's all in our way—we being Miss Wilson and the cousin, the nonentity. We can give Mr. Bradshaw a lift as far as he goes, and then he can take the growler on. Then more good-nights are wished than the nature of things will admit of before to-morrow, Fenwick and Vereker light something to smoke, with a preposterous ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... professedly antithetical to that of the Eleatics, who, it will be remembered, worked out on abstract lines a theory of one indivisible, eternal, immovable Being. Democritus, on the contrary, declared for two co-equal elements, the Full and the Empty, or Being and Nonentity. The latter, he maintained, was as real as the former. As we should put it, Body is unthinkable except by reference to space which that body does not occupy, as well as to space which it does occupy; and conversely Space is unthinkable except by reference to body ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... occupying a position of no authority, to fathom what may be in the minds of those great Princes of the Church, the Archbishops. In effect they rule the country, and it is possible that they prefer to place on the throne a drunken nonentity who will offer no impediment to their ambitions, rather than to elect a moral young man who might in time prove too strong ...
— The Sword Maker • Robert Barr
... intimate part of his life as if he were being attacked in his physical person. Strip a man one by one of his physical acquisitions, of his associates, of the indications and mementos of the things he has thought and done, and there would be no "self" left. To speak of a man as a nonentity is to imply that he is no "self" worth speaking of; that he can be blown about hither and thither; that neither his opinions nor desires, nor possessions, nor associates make an iota of difference in the world. A man who is a "somebody," a "person to be reckoned with," is one who is ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... and Alexander Armstrong—and the old chaplain who had been Michael's father's tutor and was now an almost doddering old nonentity also stood waiting in his white surplice at ...
— The Man and the Moment • Elinor Glyn
... Sophia Harding hated me with a deadly hatred. Formerly she had been indifferent to me. Concentrated upon her husband, adoring him, vain of him, greedily ambitious for his advancement, she had had no time to bestow on a clerical nonentity. But as I grew to understand what her husband really was she grew to hate me. She was almost rude to me. She spoke ill of me behind my back. She even tried to oust me from my position as senior curate ...
— The Dweller on the Threshold • Robert Smythe Hichens
... held by our countrymen to be native to the Peninsula. There is nothing so disarming as conventionality—and nothing less suspicious. Larralde seemed ever to be a typical Spaniard—indolently polite, gravely indifferent—a cigarette- smoking nonentity. ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... to be colourless in mind as well as in feature. She impressed me neither favourably nor the reverse. She was a nonentity. It was easy to see that she was passionately devoted both to her husband and to her little son. Her light grey eyes wandered continually from one to the other, noting every little want and forestalling ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... knew he had come in, but they had ignored him thereafter. He was such a colorless nonentity that he simply seemed to fade into the background of the walls once he ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett
... these exceptions should also be included such words as "pseudo-critic," "non-ego," "non-existent." Compare "pseudonym," where the prefix is contracted, and "nonentity." Words like "pre-eminent," divided for the same reason, have ...
— "Stops" - Or How to Punctuate. A Practical Handbook for Writers and Students • Paul Allardyce
... into the knowledge of my unhappiness as I grew in knowledge of what might have been; but the recluse life of a French girl prevents her from expecting much from marriage but an increase of consequence. With us it is a step from tutelage to liberty—from nonentity to importance. It cannot be quite so much so in England; but, from the greater prevalence of celibacy, it has even more ECLAT and prestige than here, where marriage is the rule. The TROUSSEAU, the presents, the congratulations, the going into society under ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... would never be made, and copying pamphlets that would (most fortunately) never be printed. Often he thought he would rather "break stones on the road," drive a hansom cab, or even go on the stage, than be the superfluous secretary of such a dull, though dear nonentity. ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson
... In the case of the Royal Navy, the aggravation was particularly acute. The deck-officers, then as now, were sons of gentlemen, were members of an ancient and honourable service, a service included among that select quaternity, to be outside of which was to be a nonentity—the Navy, the Army, the Church, and the Bar. The naval officer, then as now, did not soil his hands, wore a sword, and was swathed in an inextricable meshwork of red tape, service codes, and High Toryism. He had his own peculiar ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... observed of them on board the prison-ship. They would scold, quarrel and fight, by slapping each other's chops with the flat hand, and cry like so many girls. I have often thought that one of our Yankees, with his iron fist, could, by one blow, send monsieur into his nonentity. Perhaps such a man as Napoleon Bonaparte, could make any nation courageous; but there is some difference between courage and bravery. I have been amused, amid captivity, on observing the volatile Frenchman ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... honesty; and he esteemed himself above all the world, because he had trampled under foot all scruples. Every thing was to him a means. He was a statesman of materialism, playing the popular game, with no end but the terrible game itself, with no stake but his life, and with no responsibility beyond nonentity. Such a man must be profoundly indifferent either to despotism or to liberty. His contempt of the people must incline him rather to the side of tyranny. When we can detect nothing divine in men, the better part to ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... I born. Thus awaking from the long night of what seemed, but was not, nonentity, at once into the very regions of fairy land—into a palace of imagination—into the wild dominions of monastic thought and erudition—it is not singular that I gazed around me with a startled and ardent eye—that I loitered away my boyhood in books, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... literary attainments. She is more flippant, but he has ten times her learning: he is a regular scholar; but her learning is that of a school-boy in one of the lower forms." If this were so, it is strange that Thrale should cut so poor a figure, should seem little better than a nonentity, whilst every imaginable topic was under animated discussion at his table; for Boswell was more ready to report the husband's sayings than the wife's. In a marginal note on one of the printed letters she says: "Mr. Thrale was a very merry talking man in 1760; but the distress ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... awfully sudden had been the blow! True, there had been an absence of some months in which the change had operated. But absence is a blank, a nonentity. He had left her in apparent health, in the time of prosperity and pride. He saw her again—stricken down in body and temper—chastened—humbled—dying. And this being, so bright and lofty, how had she loved him! Never ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Italy about 465. He attached himself to the party of Ricimer, and before long became a conspicuous captain of foederati After the death of Ricimer (18th August, 472), there was a series of rapid revolutions in the Roman State. Olybrius, the then reigning nonentity, died in ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... and they seem to have cared little whether these reports contradicted one another. He exhibited his adversary as a man of unbounded violence, as a man of the most pusillanimous nature; General Rukavina was despicable, said these documents, he was an absolute nonentity; but no, shrieked von Thurn on the next day, this man Rukavina was imbued as no other with the abominable spirit of Machiavelli. To bring about the fall of the Hungarian party in Dalmatia, Count Raymond's police set themselves the task of laying by the heels such ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... had been changed into Israel, it was so with Moses, Elijah, and Jeremiah. But what is the meaning of the very first commandment, 'Thou shalt have no other gods before me?' Could this command have been addressed to a nation to whom the plural of God was a nonentity? It might be answered that the plural of God was to the Jews as revolting as it is to us, that it was revolting to their faith, if not to their reason. But how was it that their language tolerated the plural of a word which excludes plurality as much as the word ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... They walked round the oblong arena in the Palais de l'Industrie exactly as circus people do round the track at the Hippodrome. The most interesting figure was old Jerome—interesting, not for himself, as he was a nonentity, but as the brother of the most ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... boarder, and was eager to see Genestas, to whom she made a very deferential courtesy, while she scanned him from head to foot. A thoughtful and dejected expression gave a harsh look to the soldier's face. In the dialogue between master and servant the latter had appeared to him in the light of a nonentity; and although he regretted the fact, this revelation had lessened the high opinion that he had formed of the man whose persistent efforts to save the district from the horrors of cretinism ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... Progress of Science sufficiently show that the study of geometry was almost a nonentity in England previously to the commencement of the eighteenth century. Before this period Dr. Dee, the celebrated author of the preliminary discourse to Billingsley's Euclid, had indeed resided at Manchester (1595), ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 34, June 22, 1850 • Various
... had changed. Lawson might have been a nonentity for all he counted. Longstreth was another man—a stranger to Duane. If he had entertained a hope of freeing himself from this band, of getting away to a safer country, he abandoned it at the very sight of these men. There was power here, and he ...
— The Lone Star Ranger • Zane Grey
... call me a nonentity if they will; I believe that some of those who say I am a phantom would alter their tone provided they were to ask me to a good dinner; bottles emptied and fowls devoured are not exactly the feats of a phantom: no! I partake more of the nature of a Brownie or Robin Goodfellow—goblins, ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... man in the town; no one would have dared to dispute his place as cock of the walk at the Hotel de Rupt, and all Besancon regarded him as Rosalie de Watteville's future husband. There had even been some exchange of ideas on the subject between the Baroness and Amedee, to which the Baron's apparent nonentity gave some certainty. ...
— Albert Savarus • Honore de Balzac
... prove the historical nonentity of Dr. Faustus was made at Wittenberg, in the year 1683. Some of his popular biographers had claimed for him a professorship at that celebrated university, or at least brought him into connection with it,—a pretension which the actual professors of that learned institution thought rather prejudicial ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... drawbacks," he lamented. "As a brother I am a nonentity, Lady Huntingford; it's not altogether relishable, you know. It's a sort of pantomime, for me, by Jove. I'm the fool, and this seems to be the ...
— Nedra • George Barr McCutcheon
... My dear Ansard, it is however of no consequence. Nothing is more difficult to attain, yet nothing is more easy to describe, than a good dinner. I was once reading a very fashionable novel by a very fashionable bookseller, for the author is a mere nonentity, and was very much surprised at the accuracy with which a good dinner was described. The mystery was explained a short time afterwards, when casually taking up Eustache Eude's book in Sams's library, I found, that ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat
... up a conversation with him. Fink contrived not to appear aware of his presence, without, however, being in any way rude. Every one felt it to be in the nature of things; and Ehrenthal himself humbly acted the part of nonentity assigned to him, and consoled himself by eating a ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... understand how his eccentric behavior could be harmonized with those principles of teaching which she had imbibed at the state normal school in itself lifted him nearer to equality with her. A public nuisance is really more respectable than a nonentity. ...
— The Brown Mouse • Herbert Quick
... husband had cleared the board; and had rancid oil and sour wine given him, when they enjoyed the best. The slaves had snubbed him and made fun of him; the freedmen regarded him with absolute disdain; Valeria's regular visitors treated him as a nonentity. Besides, all his standards of ethical righteousness were outraged by the round of life which he was compelled daily to witness. The worthy man would long before have ceased from a vassalage so disgraceful, had ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... as of the uninterrupted exertion thereof over all his works, in heaven, earth, and hell, however unsearchable by his creatures. A God without election, they argue, or choice in all his works, is a God without existence, a mere idol, a nonentity. And to deny God's election, purpose, and express will, in all his works, is to make ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... TWENTY YEARS convert infants into lovers, and fathers and mothers, render youth the operative generation, decide men's fortunes and distinctions, convert active men into crawling drivellers, and bury all the preceding generation. THIRTY YEARS raise an active generation from nonentity, change fascinating beauties into merely bearable old women, convert lovers into grandfathers and grandmothers, and bury the active generation, or reduce them to decrepitude and imbecility. FORTY YEARS, alas! change ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 341, Saturday, November 15, 1828. • Various
... themselves with solemn satisfaction to the "Thornleigh Arms," where a certain portion of their weekly wage would presently transfer itself from their own pockets to that of its jovial landlord. Joe Lovelady was a great, soft, lumbering fellow, who was considered rather a nonentity in Thornleigh; but Ted Wharton was a very different person. He was the village Radical—an adventurous spirit who, not content with spelling out his newspaper conscientiously on Sunday, was wont to ...
— North, South and Over the Sea • M.E. Francis (Mrs. Francis Blundell)
... ahead of me? No, not you," he exclaimed at last, in reply to some version of his own of my ideas, which I carefully made a nonentity under the scrutiny of his keen blue eyes. "No, no, missy; you wait a bit. Uncle Sam was not hatched yesterday, and it takes fifty young ladies to ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... person of influence except as it might be represented in a draft on the Bank of British North America. He had never converted anybody to anything, and never would, possibly because the governing principle of his life was the terror of being converted to anything himself. If an important nonentity is an imaginable thing, perhaps it would stand for Mr Milburn; and he found it a more valuable combination than it may appear, since his importance gave him position and opportunity, and his nonentity saved him from their risks. Certainly he had not imposed his view upon ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... speak, for inviting that lady and her daughter, you understand of whom I am speaking? It needed the utmost delicacy, the greatest nicety, but she has managed things so that that fool, that conceited baggage, that provincial nonentity, simply because she is the widow of a major, and has come to try and get a pension and to fray out her skirts in the government offices, because at fifty she paints her face (everybody knows it)... a creature like that did not think fit ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... is the best and kindest of men; his wife is—well, a nonentity, perhaps, but not a disagreeable one; ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... there the day after my interview with Mrs. Graham, he happened to be from home—a circumstance by no means so agreeable to me now as it had been on former occasions. Miss Millward was there, it is true, but she, of course, would be little better than a nonentity. However, I resolved to make my visit a short one, and to talk to Eliza in a brotherly, friendly sort of way, such as our long acquaintance might warrant me in assuming, and which, I thought, could neither give offence nor ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... Oxford nonentity, Mr. Langham, the Elsmeres' friend? Ridiculous! What attraction could a man of that type have for a ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... this liberal, high-toned father's mode of influencing his son with the tyrannous control of the haughty count, and contrasted Ronald's untrammeled position with his own state of dependent nonentity, he felt that unstruggling submission to the cruel decree which doomed him to waste those fresh, strong, aspiring years of his life in hopeless idleness was a weakness rather than ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... Tusk, was a nonentity put into a red jacket. The surgeon was a tall, and very finicking sort of gentleman as to dress; but well informed, friendly in disposition, and perfectly acquainted ...
— Percival Keene • Frederick Marryat
... a long time; for during my life I had had many opportunities of observation, and amongst other cases that had interested me, I had seen some not unlike the present. The fact was that, as everybody counted me nobody, I had taken full advantage of my conceded nonentity, which, like Jack the Giant-killer's coat of darkness, enabled me to learn much that would otherwise have escaped me. My reflections on my observations, however, did not lead me to any further or more practical conclusion just yet, than that other and ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 1 • George MacDonald
... had the feeling that, for all her repression, Maggie would have been glad to be more free with him. And he knew enough of human nature not to be too disheartened by her attitude. Had he been a nonentity to her, she would have ignored him. Her very insults were proof that he was a positive personality with real significance in her life. And so he counseled himself to have patience and await a thawing or an awaking. Besides, he kept repeating ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... Britain had no idea of annexing Belgian territory, one naturally wonders how the value of Belgium's defence system had been depreciated by conversations with British officers. In effect, Germany maintains that Belgium should have behaved as a nonentity, which is contrary to ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... stock. The Indian is, in every view, entitled to sympathy. The misfortune with the race is, that, seated on the skirts of the domain of a popular government, they have no vote to give. They are politically a nonentity. The moral and benevolent powers of our system are with the people. Government has nothing to do with them. The whole Indian race is not, in the political scales, worth one white man's vote. Here is the difficulty in any benevolent ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... inflated with a sense of his own importance, he began abusing one of the native drivers of the Nepaulee chief; this man did not submit tamely to his insolence. To him the magistrate was nobody, and the pompous Jemadar a perfect nonentity. He accordingly turned round and poured forth a perfect flood of invective. Never was collapse more utter. The Jemadar took a back seat at once, and no more that day did we hear his melodious voice ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... union between France and Spain, Louis XIV. becoming, by the death without issue of the Spanish king, sovereign of both countries, to the upsetting of the European balance of power. Spain had become a nonentity; she had no money, no navy, no commerce, no manufactures, and a population reduced by emigration, and by the expulsion of Jews and Moors, to about seven millions: nothing remained to her but that "pride" of which she was always so solicitous, based as it ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... watching over and directing every separate detail; or they are the result of pure chance and accident. There is nothing intermediate between these two causes. Natural law—apart from design and a designer—is, as we have seen, a nonentity—a mere expression of observed facts, for which it can give no account whatever. Mr. Darwin's argument is expressly directed to exclude the interference of a superintending Providence. Chance is the only cause which he can bring forward. ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... attracted by anyone possessed of riches and a title—or of either of the two? As an au fait in the female temperament, I shall wager that it is nine out of ten that if you spoof this mercenary young minx into believing that you are merely a native impecunious nonentity, and not to be shot at with powder, she will instantaneously drop ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... seen and heard, as yet, but one side of the question; and if I speak freely to you, it is only to give you the advantage of my experience from having mixed with the world. I am true to my party, and, as a man, I must belong to a party, or I become a nonentity. But were I in a condition so unshackled that I might take up or lay down my opinions as I pleased, without loss of character—as a woman may, for instance—so little do I care for party—so well balanced do I know the ...
— Snarleyyow • Captain Frederick Marryat
... Zara?" the man said, with his slow, soft smile. "What would you have, degraded daughter of a degraded mother—his toy of an hour? And there is another daughter—a fair-haired, insipid nonentity of a dozen years, no more like our beautiful one here than a farthing rush-light is like ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... idealogue. He was a theorist on governments, which he invented in any convenient number. For the Consulate he had his theory ready. The First Consul was to be like an epicurean divinity, enjoying himself and taking care for no one. But this tranquillity of position, and nonentity of power, by no means suited the taste of Napoleon. "'Your Grand Elector," said he (the title which seems to have been intended for his head of his new constitution,) "would be nothing but an idle king. The time for do-nothing kings is gone by—six millions of francs and the Tuilleries, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... (actually discovered it in a violin shop), and the lid of an Etruscan kettle (he had lighted on it, by pure chance, in a kettle shop in Etruria), and Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown would feel faint with despair at the nonentity ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock
... sat a nonentity in impeccable dress, dangling a monocle and trying to make small-talk, the while he dallied with a Bronx cocktail, costing more than a day's wage for a childish flower-making slave of the tenements, and inhaled a Rotten Row cigarette, the "last word" from London in the tobacco ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... war department. "I do not inquire into the theory of councils," said the able Dubois to the Regent by the mouth of his confidant Chavigny; "it was, as you know, the object of worship to the shallow pates of the old court. Humiliated by their nonentity at the end of the last reign, they begot this system upon the reveries of M. de Cambrai. But I think of you, I think of your interests. The king will reach, his majority, the grandees of the kingdom approach the monarque by virtue of their birth; if to this privilege they unite that ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... Animal., cap. 8.] further remarks, retracing her steps, reverts to where she had set out, and returns at the end of her course to the goal whence she had started. As animal generation proceeds from that which is not animal, entity from nonentity, so, by a retrograde course, entity, by corruption, is resolved into nonentity, whence that in animals, which was last created, fails first and that which ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various |
