"Nothingness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... article of food which was exactly similar to anything on Earth. Every plant and flower and vegetable and animal has been so refined by ages of careful, scientific cultivation and breeding that the like of them on Earth dwindled into pale, gray, characterless nothingness by comparison. ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... didn't for bric-a-brac care, So she traded the lamp For an Ecuador stamp That somebody told her was rare! This act served to madden The mind of Aladdin, But, 'spite of his impotent wrath, His manor-house vanished, To nothingness banished, And while ...
— Grimm Tales Made Gay • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... discover in time, my dear child, that only under the Municipal Ownership of Brains such as we have here, can such great ideas be seized from the infinity of nothingness and turned into an irresistible propaganda," said the ...
— Alice in Blunderland - An Iridescent Dream • John Kendrick Bangs
... priceless as was the secret Young John Cara had chosen to let die with him—the art of it was frail, frail as the titlark's song. His masterpiece, indeed, had in it the corruption of Celtic art. It could not endure its native weather, and rusted away almost to nothingness. When the late Sir Gilbert Aubyn, the famous neo-Gothic architect, was called in (1885) to restore Porthennis Church—or, as we say in Cornwall, to "restroy" it—he swept the remnants away. But the ...
— News from the Duchy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... beyond ours, and account it madness to say there is nothing. Nonentity is incompatible with the infinite entity of God. They lay down two principles of metaphysics, entity which is the highest God, and nothingness which is the defect of entity. Evil and sin come of the propensity to nothingness; the sin having its cause not efficient, but in deficiency. Deficiency is, they say, of power, wisdom, or will. Sin they place in the last ...
— The City of the Sun • Tommaso Campanells
... cradled in his arms, looking upwards to his face above her, its beauty distinct in the soft light, feeling his heart beating against her side, it seemed as if her happiness was too great for the human frame to bear, as if it must dissolve, melt into nothingness, against his breast, and her spirit pass into the great desert solitudes, dispersed, almost annihilated, in the ...
— Six Women • Victoria Cross
... thee, loathsome reptile! Even as thou diest, crushed and writhing, and nature breathes no sigh for thy fate, so will the destroyers of the Past perish in the abyss of nothingness, leaving no trace, and awakening ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... thought it was play, Marguerite, confess it! You thought the wild Cuban girl was uttering empty breath of nothingness; you have had no real anxiety, you never dreamed that I should really find myself—where now I am. Where is it? Listen, Marguerite! My house—once Carlos's house, now mine by his brotherly gift—stands in a little glen of the hills. An open space, once dry grass, now bare earth, baked ...
— Rita • Laura E. Richards
... seemed to be floating up, up, up, out of the black oblivion of nothingness. He tried to speak, but he knew that he made ...
— Across the Years • Eleanor H. Porter
... vicious idler, vexed to see the fortunes of his industrious neighbor growing while he is lounging and murmuring, who robs and murders that he may get unlawful gain. It is the merry, thoughtless idler who, to relieve the nothingness of his days, seeks the excitement of the wine-cup and the gaming-table. It is the sensual idler, whose licentious ear is open to the voice of the tempter as often as his track crosses the ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... 5 For behold, if the knowledge of the goodness of God at this time has awakened you to a sense of your nothingness, and your ...
— The Book Of Mormon - An Account Written By The Hand Of Mormon Upon Plates Taken - From The Plates Of Nephi • Anonymous
... downwards on to the altar. The cloven-hoofed horse gave one shrill neigh, and one convulsion, and fell back dead. Flames crackled out from the wood pile, and the air became rich with the smell of burning flesh. And lo! in another moment the cloud above had melted into nothingness, and the flames burnt pale, and the smoke went up in a thin blue spiral towards the deeper blueness of ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... of universal dominion by the energy of the Brahma weapon, the five elements forsook the illustrious Ravana, and were consumed by the Brahma weapon, the physical ingredients of Ravana's body. His flesh and blood were all reduced to nothingness,—so that the ashes ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... where hawks and eagles make their nests; then once more it closes in, the creek plunges down a narrow gorge and disappears, writhing tortuously on its way to the Salagua whose fire-blasted walls rise in huge bulwarks against the south, dwarfing the near-by cliffs into nothingness ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... some desperate small being were at bay before a horrible monster. M. Bergson is afraid of space, of mathematics, of necessity, and of eternity; he is afraid of the intellect and the possible discoveries of science; he is afraid of nothingness and death. These fears may prevent him from being a philosopher in the old and noble sense of the word; but they sharpen his sense for many a psychological problem, and make him the spokesman of many an inarticulate soul. Animal timidity ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... he is not to perish with his duty undone, is the utmost wariness and the swiftest resolution. Yet it is not too much to say that, except when Horatio forces the matter on his attention, he shows no consciousness of this position. He muses in the graveyard on the nothingness of life and fame, and the base uses to which our dust returns, whether it be a court-jester's or a world-conqueror's. He learns that the open grave over which he muses has been dug for the woman he loved; and he suffers one terrible pang, from which he gains ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... frightful thing art thou, when kindled more by fear than hope! How dost thou twist thyself round the heart, torturing its pulsations! How dost thou dart unknown pangs all through our feeble mechanism, now seeming to shiver us like broken glass, to nothingness—now giving us a fresh strength, which can do nothing, and so torments us by a sensation, such as the strong man must feel who cannot break his fetters, though they bend in his grasp. Slowly paced the bright, bright orb up the eastern sky; long ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... the kindness and hospitality of thy worthy citizens! May thy gates continue shut to thine enemies as heretofore, and, as heretofore, may they ever prove those of happiness to thy friends! Dear nuns of Santa Clara! I thank thee for the enjoyment of many an hour of nothingness; and thine, Santa Barbara, for many of a more intellectual cast! May the voice of thy chapel-organ continue unrivalled but by the voices of thy lovely choristers! and may the piano in thy refectory be replaced by a better, in which the harmony of strings may supersede the clattering of ivories! ...
— Adventures in the Rifle Brigade, in the Peninsula, France, and the Netherlands - from 1809 to 1815 • Captain J. Kincaid
... opposition of soul and body a mere illusion, and the true self neither soul nor body, but the union of the two in the 'I' which is above them? And is death the assertion of this individuality in the higher nature, and the falling away into nothingness of the lower? Or are we vainly attempting to pass the boundaries of human thought? The body and the soul seem to be inseparable, not only in fact, but in our conceptions of them; and any philosophy which too closely unites them, or too widely separates them, either ...
— Phaedo - The Last Hours Of Socrates • Plato
... sat crouched in a corner of the waiting-room, and pass out again, laughing. The snarl had died from his face; a dull, listless indifference had taken its place—the look one sees on the face of a beaten dog, after the beating is over, when it is lying very still, its great eyes staring into nothingness, and one wonders ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... Celt, he asks, achieved distinguished success in every country of Europe but his own? The state in which he is to be found in Ireland to-day must be, therefore, accounted for on some other theory than the inherent good-for-nothingness of his nature. "The sluggish, well-meaning mind of the English nation," he continues, "so willing to do its duty, so slow to discover that it has any duty to do, is now perforce rousing to ask ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... time he was shuddering rapidly. A peculiar feeling, as if his belly were turned into nothingness, made him want to press his fists into his abdomen. He remained shuddering drunkenly, like a drunken man who is sick, incapable ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... day when I gave my heart to you, my life was yours wholly. If a doubt or a suspicion comes to you, question me. The present is yours, and you know well there is only you, you alone, in it. As for my past, if you knew what nothingness it was you would be glad. I do not think another woman made as I was, to love, would have brought to you a mind newer to love than is mine. That I swear to you. The years that were spent without you—I did not live! Let us not talk of them. There is nothing in them of which I should be ashamed. ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... 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, thread the maze of space—still, I say, I shall companion thee. Wherever thou goest, in whatever form of life thou livest, there I shall be! Art thou wafted to the farthest star, art thou buried in Amenti's lowest deep—in lives, in deaths, in sleeps, in ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... Griffin without taking his eyes from the newspaper before him. He was seated by the window, musing the morning news, his curved pipe hanging idle from his mouth, from which incipient clouds of smoke lazily issued and as lazily climbed upward and vanished through the open casement into threads of nothingness. ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... Carrigan went to bed. Even then he did not sleep for a long time. The patter of the rain grew less and less on the roof of the bateau, and as the sound of it droned itself off into nothingness, slumber came. David was conscious of the moment when the rain ceased entirely. Then he slept. At least he must have been very close to sleep, or had been asleep and was returning for a moment close to consciousness, when he heard a voice. It came ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood
... say? Life is cruel. Life is a splendid portico—to nothingness. Ah, no! not if in that portico you have stood for a moment, loving and beloved, by the side of Isabel. Life is splendid! life is kind! life is abounding, deep-cupped! and each minute of it is a ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... throbbed itself away; the spiritual gusts of thought grew continually fainter, till, like the echoes of a dying harp, like the breath of a falling gale, they slowly sank to nothingness. Then wearied with an extreme of wild emotion Beatrice sought her bed again and presently was ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... from primeval nothingness didst call, First chaos, then existence. Lord! on Thee Eternity had its foundation; all Sprung forth from Thee:—of light, joy, harmony, Sole origin:—all life, all beauty Thine. Thy word created all, and doth create; Thy splendor fills all space with rays divine. ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... there must be in the grave. The thought came gently and stealthily, and it seemed long before it attained full appreciation; but just as my spirit came at length properly to feel and entertain it, the figures of the judges vanished, as if magically, from before me; the tall candles sank into nothingness; their flames went out utterly; the blackness of darkness supervened; all sensations appeared swallowed up in a mad rushing descent as of the soul into Hades. Then silence, and stillness, night ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... after birth, that we never do them automatically save as the result of long practice; the stages in the case of any acquired facility, the inception of which we have been able to watch, have invariably been from a nothingness of ignorant impotence to a little somethingness of highly self-conscious, arduous performance, and thence to the unselfconsciousness of easy mastery. I saw one year a poor blind lad of about eighteen sitting on a wall by the wayside at Varese, playing ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... valedictorian.'' This disgusted me. If that was the style of classical scholarship at Yale, I knew that there was nothing in it for me. It turned out as my friend said. That glib reciter did become the valedictorian of the class, but stepped from the commencement stage into nothingness, and was never heard of more. Goddard became the editor of one of the most important metropolitan news- papers of the United States, and, before his early death, distinguished himself as a writer on ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... grandsons of Charlemagne, devoted their entire lives to repeated and furious civil wars, in which the empire fell apart, the flower of the Frankish race perished, and the strength of its dominion was sapped to nothingness.[1] ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... birds came thicker and thicker, and I shot, as I have said, better and better. This may be judged from the fact that, notwithstanding their height and tremendous pace, I killed my last thirty pheasants with thirty-five cartridges. The final bird of all, a splendid cock, appeared by himself out of nothingness when we thought that all was done. I think it must have been flushed from the covert on the hill, or been turned back just as it reached it by the resistless strength of the storm. Over it came, so high above us that it looked quite small ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... away, awed, and yet with a peace in his heart that he had not known for years. He had saved his friend from the first wild melee of the war—the war that promised rest and nothingness to him, even while he kept his promise to "live ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... would be folly to pretend that it escaped abuse in New England; but there was in it an element manly, healthful and invigorating. On the other hand, those who shaped the character, and in a great measure the destiny, of New France had always on their lips the nothingness and the vanity of life. For them, time was nothing but a preparation for eternity, and the highest virtue consisted in a renunciation of all the cares, toils and interests of earth. That such a doctrine has often been ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... the one and true God in all his various manifestations.[780] Thus the Stoic Pantheism, in spite of its weak points, could find room for the deities of the city-state, and put new illuminating life into them. To us it may seem, as it seems to Dr. Bussell, that they would disappear in an immense nothingness; but to the Roman mind of Scipio's age, if I am not mistaken, they might, on the contrary, save the great Pantheistic idea from so itself disappearing. I cannot but think that the Roman's idea of divinity, the force or will-power which he called numen,[781] would find here ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... fidelity the lineaments of that observed in the same latitudes seven years previously. The narrow ribbon of light, contracting towards the sun, and running outward from it to a distance of thirty-five degrees; the unsubstantial head—a veiled nothingness, as it appeared, since no distinct nucleus could be made out; the quick fading into invisibility, were all accordant peculiarities, and they were confirmed by some rough calculations of its orbit, showing geometrical affinity to be no less unmistakable than physical likeness. ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... wanted the old Wilkie Collins idea of a plot with a hundred threads drawn into one woof, or did he prefer modern nothingness, a shred of a story attached to unending analysis and the infinitely little commented upon with elaborate and pretentious humour. He ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... in the sunlight of fact. Woman's nature is as beautiful and fascinating now as when the master-hand of the world's greatest poet delineated it, and when living, breathing Edith Allen stepped suddenly among his shadows, seemingly so luminous, they vanished before her, as the stars pale into nothingness when the eastern sky is aglow with morning. Now, in all his horizon, she only shone, but the past seemed like ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... crystal was that of glass and to fly skyward a hundred feet, scintillant white star drift of comminuted sea. The crash of such waves on such rocks, the hollow diapason of their like on sands, and the shrill roar of a pebbly beach torn and tossed by the waves, all sprang from nothingness into vibrant being there in the black woods as the gale shouldered by ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... valley. Southward, in the wake of the chaotic charge, moved a mighty, gigantic crevasse, whose sides were the walls of the hives left standing. And still the cube-army moved in, grinding everything it touched to dust, trampling buildings into nothingness, destroying utterly along a front hundreds of miles wide, and as deep as the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... day being rebuked by a pessimist replied, "How can you who revile me consent to speak by my machinery? Permit me to reduce you to nothingness and then we will discuss the matter." Moral. You should not look a gift ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... of the hundred thousand chevaliers who hail the advent of war as something which will hide their nothingness. ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... the conversation. You have given us the history of a most interesting recollection and well expressed a solemn though humiliating feeling. In such moments and among such scenes it is impossible not to be struck with the nothingness of human glory and the transiency of human works. This, one of the greatest monuments on the face of the earth, was raised by a people, then its masters, only seventeen centuries ago; in a few ages more it ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... blood, His fury mildly thus withstood: Great Sir, quoth he, your mighty spirit Is rais'd too high: this slave does merit 1035 To be the hangman's bus'ness, sooner Than from your hand to have the honour Of his destruction. I, that am A nothingness in deed and name Did scorn to hurt his forfeit carcase, 1040 Or ill intreat his fiddle or case: Will you, great Sir, that glory blot In cold blood which you gain'd in hot? Will you employ your conqu'ring sword To break ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... Nippur, and be a man. One lesson these ancient ruins teach—the nothingness of fame, and that the only things in life worth while are love and duty. I cannot think of any blessing so great to an ardent young American as to learn at the very threshold of his career of activities that duty and affection are ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... single proposition. All I can do is to erase every word which might have occasioned him the least annoyance; and indeed, as seldom as possible to introduce his respected name. An open grave reminds one of the nothingness of earthly controversy; as nothing else does, or ...
— The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark • John Burgon
... pointing in a threatening attitude to a village below, as if dooming it to destruction; sometimes with arms upraised, as if invoking ruin upon all the country; and sometimes stalking along with such tremendous strides as to make but one step from peak to peak; often dwarfing himself to nothingness, and again stretching up until his head is in the clouds, then disappearing entirely for a moment, only to reappear ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... objective universe. In dreaming we are conscious of the inner world. Then we are of great help to the living, and also the misnamed dead. In dreamlessness the true seer turns the light of consciousness back upon itself and in its own light sees the gloom of nothingness. Imagine for a moment the absolute non-existence of the vast world devoid of sight and sound. What remains a vast space. Imagine the vast space to be void of ether and the subtle seeds of creation. Perfect stillness reigns supreme over the ocean of universal ...
— The Secret of Dreams • Yacki Raizizun
... was about seven in the evening, but all things lay as in the stillness of midnight. They two might have been the only beings in the living world—all else dead and buried under the white snow. And then, lifting itself out of the horizon's black nothingness, arose the great red moon, ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... God our Father—conscious of Himself and of us—a person in a very real sense—from Whom we derive personality—from Whom we came—and to Whom we go. If mankind loses that, "his arms do clasp the air" and he drowns in the infinity of time and space and his own nothingness. We have from Christ the truth and somehow we must learn it with a new understanding—or rather with the new understanding that modern science and modern reverent scientific thought have given us. I am sitting at my desk in my cabin at sunset. The day has been cool and grey—a ...
— Frank H. Nelson of Cincinnati • Warren C. Herrick
... wert thou nothingness? What is there that I fear to say? And yet, what help?... Ah, well-a-day, This ache of ...
— The Trojan women of Euripides • Euripides
... one sees at night from the Green below. Dozens of lighted windows gleam softly through the foliage, for all the world like witches' lamps. The day reveals thin, blue plumes of smoke stealing out of the tops of the trees to be wafted off into nothingness; they come from invisible chimneys far down in the leafy fastnesses. Up here are the huts of the newly married. Almost without exception, they are tiny affairs, scarcely larger than the metaphorical bandbox. ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... finished. But just as he was going to reply, she resumed her queer rhapsody—'never carried away, out of themselves, always conscious, always self-conscious, always aware of themselves. Isn't ANYTHING better than this? Better be animals, mere animals with no mind at all, than this, this NOTHINGNESS—' ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... of Santa Maria delta Croce, founded by yourself in the hope that you might there end your days. Far be it from me to dissuade you from your sacred vocation, when I am myself descending into the tomb and am conscious of the nothingness of all human greatness. Only grant me one year of widowhood before you pass on to your bridal with the Lord, one year in which you will watch over Joan and her husband, to keep from them all the dangers that threaten. Already the woman who was the seneschal's wife and her son have too much influence ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - JOAN OF NAPLES—1343-1382 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... guessing," Mrs. Dean smiled tolerantly. The ways of schoolgirls were usually shrouded with a profound mystery, which disappeared into nothingness when confronted with reality. ...
— Marjorie Dean - High School Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... already alive, and able by their own wills to cooperate, to pass before our eyes for a moment. To hold them longer in our view exceeds their power. But these other women, these mothers, call souls out of nothingness, and clothe them with bodies, so that they speak, walk, work, love, and hate, some forty, some ...
— Miss Ludington's Sister • Edward Bellamy
... above all the sorrow, around him; that she belonged to him, and to him alone; and the broken-hearted beggar followed the weeping Honoria towards his lady's chamber, with the step and bearing of a lord. He was wrong; there were pride and fierceness enough in his heart, mingled with that sense of nothingness of rank, money, chance and change, yea, death itself, of all but Love;—mingled even with that intense belief that his sorrows were but his just deserts, which now possessed all his soul. And in after years he knew that he was wrong; but ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... down the flags and stepped into nothingness—thirty feet sheer precipice into the ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... it might be taken to be, though considerably dilapidated and weather-worn. The water flows through it, though the rock afforded standing room, beside the pillars. It was really like the archway of an enchanted palace, all of which has vanished except the entrance,—now only into nothingness and empty space. We climbed to the top of the arch, in which the traces of water having eddied are very perceptible. This curiosity occurs in a wild part of the river's course, and ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... died, I should have died leaping. Once, and then again my foot slipped on the gathering snow as I leapt and shortened my leap; once I fell short into bushes that crashed and smashed into dusty chips and nothingness, and once I stumbled as I dropped and rolled head over heels into a gully, and rose bruised and bleeding and confused as to ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... instrument and resumed his blank stare into nothingness. Frederik was once more wholly engrossed in the book he was not reading. Hartmann broke in upon ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... waters shot forth in their fury, stood their conqueror. He was one man, yet he was doing the work of a hundred. As he battered at that bank of clay he exulted in his power. A little turn of the wrist and a huge mass of gravel crumbled into nothingness. He bored deep holes in the frozen muck, he hammered his way down to bed rock, he swept it clean as a floor. There, with the solid force of a battering-ram, he pounded at the ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... retina, gives us a sense of movement. This visual sensation of vibration is a purely subjective one, the external cause of the phenomenon is the sound. The outer world is a concert of sounds which rises in the immensity of space. Matter is noise and nothingness ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... massive double chorus ("Fixed in His everlasting Seat") in which the Israelites and Philistines celebrate the attributes of their respective deities and invoke their protection, and in which also the composer brings out with overwhelming effect the majesty and grandeur of God as compared with the nothingness of Dagon. ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... stood her own lover, handsome Stanor, bending his head to overhear a remark from Honor, stroking his blonde moustache. He looked dejected, depressed; but compared with the depth of emotion on the other man's face, such meagre expressions faded into nothingness. The moment during which she gazed at his face held for Pixie the significance of years; then once more her eyes returned to ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... so never can man cease to be. Never can he return to that awful center of nothingness, or be absorbed within the bosom of the unmanifested being. On, and on, and on, with Deific power, God moves in ever-increasing whirls ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... have no longer to deal with Death, but with Life. We no longer believe either in the nothingness of the tomb or in salvation purchased by obligatory renunciation; we want life to be good because we want it to be fruitful. Lazarus must leave his dunghill, so that the poor may no longer rejoice at the death ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... really. Merely he saw his way clear to earning a livelihood and went after it. He was miserably educated. His knowledge of mathematics embraced arithmetic up to fractions, at which point it faded off into blissful "nothingness"—as our New-Thoughtists say. But he had an inquiring mind and a proper will to succeed. While serving his three years in the shop he bought a course in a correspondence school and studied nights, taking up, among other things, the subject of mechanical drafting. When twenty-two years ...
— Opportunities in Engineering • Charles M. Horton
... this cold, dead fear before which he quailed! What was this something that in his temerity he had dared invoke—that rose now engulfing him, a puny maggot—that snatched him up and flung him headlong, shackled, before this nebulous, terrifying tribunal, where out of nothingness, out of a void, the calm, majestic features of the Patriarch took form and changed, and changed, and kept changing, and grew implacable, set with the stamp of doom. What was it—in God's name, what was it brought these sweat beads bursting to his forehead! Was he ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... gazed out across the open space it seemed that she must stand spellbound. How green the cedared foreground—how gray and barren the downward slope—how wonderful the painted steppes! The vision that had lived in her memory shrank to nothingness. The reality was immense, more than beautiful, appalling in its isolation, beyond comprehension with its ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... over. The bright yellow eyes had faded to nothingness in the sunlight. "Gave you its health," said the man of Van Daamas respectfully as he broke off the ...
— Bolden's Pets • F. L. Wallace
... And thy sweet cords Still trembled at the touch of thy right hand, Unhappy bard of love. Alas, Italian song is still the child Of sorrow born. And yet, less hard to bear, Consuming grief than dull vacuity! O blessed thou, whose life was one lament! Disgust and nothingness are still our doom, And by our cradle sit, and ...
— The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi • Giacomo Leopardi
... who beholds that loftiest and deepest, For him the fetters of the heart break asunder, For him all doubts are solved, And his works become nothingness [Footnote ref 1]. ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... into his office, leaving the new junior to absorb another impression. The words spoken did impress Nelson. He sat gazing before him at the wall, wondering why the manager was so friendly toward him and so cynical on matters of business. From looking at nothingness his eyes gradually focused on a calendar, and at an "X" mark in pencil thereon. The mark indicated the day when he would make a trip home to tell about "the world": that ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen
... but a scepter of straw in the legislative hand of the Confederation—what wonder that it soon wore a crown of thorns! The paper currency ere long dissolved to nothingness; for four days the army was without food, and whole regiments drifted from the ranks of our hard-pressed defenders. "I see," said Washington, "one head gradually changing into thirteen; I see one army gradually branching into thirteen, which, instead ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... was due to this short period of intensive training, "under men who were intelligent enough to know just what was needed and just how to go about to secure it"—men not hampered by any pedagogical nonsense or grown stale over a long attempt to discriminate between the "infinity of nothingness and the nothingness of infinity" (as one might summarize a rather common criticism), rather than to the former years of patient toil, and discipline, and accomplishment which had really laid the foundation so well that all were able thus to respond. The common school, the ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... the numbness and the blackness and you claw and convulse and you twist and turn and toss and then you ride the crests of frenzy and plunge into the troughs of panic and despair and you sweep round and round and sink down into nothingness until you break through to the freedom which comes only ...
— This Crowded Earth • Robert Bloch
... We lie and dream of nothingness; For visions come From Poppydom Direct at our command: Or, delicate alternative, In open idleness we live, With lyre and lute And silver flute, The life ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... miracle" of the reign; "so that," says Martin, "the new temple that Louis had pretended to erect to unity fell to ruin as it rose from the ground, and left only an open chasm in place of its foundations.... The nothingness of absolute government by one alone was revealed under the very reign of the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... ancient philosophy that the life of the wise man should be a contemplation of, and a preparation for, death. It certainly was so with Marcus Aurelius. The thoughts of the nothingness of man, and of that great sea of oblivion which shall hereafter swallow up all that he is and does, are ever present to his mind; they are thoughts to which he recurs more constantly than any other, and from which he always ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... not likely that less than a million years have elapsed since the first page of this new chapter in the history of creation was opened: it is probable that the time has been much longer. In comparison with such a period, the whole recorded duration of human history shrinks into nothingness. The pyramids of Egypt seem like things of yesterday when we think of the Cave-Men of western Europe in the glacial period, who scratched pictures of mammoths on pieces of reindeer-antler with a bit of pointed flint. Yet during an entire geologic aeon before these Cave-Men appeared ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... being a delicate but rhythmical deepening of the central hue. The wash of my wading seems not to affect them. I become conscious of the sudden appearance and swift disappearance of lesser spheres of startling brilliance. They emerge from nothingness, pause for a moment, and shoot towards me with extraordinary impulse. Each is a mere globule, resplendently blue. The tint intensifies as with accelerated velocity the atom flies until of its own excessive energy it explodes with a shell-like flash, leaving ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... bald head, and a hooked nose upon which were set a pair of enormous horn-rimmed spectacles that accentuated his general resemblance to an owl perched upon the edge of its nest-hole. He was busily engaged in doing nothing, and in staring into nothingness as, according to Tom, was his habit when communing with what he, Tom, called ...
— The Virgin of the Sun • H. R. Haggard
... to have only one surface—that of the water which is pushed back by the contained air. Just as such bubbles are not water, but are precisely the spots from which water is absent, so these units are not koilon, but the absence of koilon—the only spots where it is not—specks of nothingness floating in it, so to speak, for the interior of these space-bubbles is an absolute void to the highest power of vision that we can turn ...
— Occult Chemistry - Clairvoyant Observations on the Chemical Elements • Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater
... tone of the landscape was of gold and blood; through the heart of which ran the river, changing by infinitesimal, overlapping shadings from yellow into red, from red into night-colour, from night-colour into nothingness. Down this roadway passed the trespassers, with the thing which they had stolen weighing down their canoe to the point of danger; murder was in their hearts, and grey fear ran before them. Instinctively they bowed their heads, suspicious ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... in his stirrups and pointing his drawn sword heavenwards, thanks on the evening of Denain, is one God: quite another is the God within whose bosom the author of the Imitation, in a corner of his cell, feels the nothingness of all human victories." ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... cliff holes. They were harmless and just settling down for the night. But of higher types of animals from which something might be learned—hoppers, runners—there were no traces. For all he was able to pick up, they might be climbing into blank nothingness. ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... the work of Richard Strauss appears to me up to the present. Guntram kills Duke Robert, and immediately lets fall his sword. The frenzied laugh of Zarathustra ends in an avowal of discouraged impotence. The delirious passion of Don Juan dies away in nothingness. Don Quixote when dying forswears his illusions. Even the Hero himself admits the futility of his work, and seeks oblivion in an indifferent Nature. Nietzsche, speaking of the artists of our time, laughs at "those ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... night, floated over Walter's reeling brain; darkness, pierced by a thousand gleaming, twinkling lights, brilliant as stars, then came a void and nothingness. Slowly at last he felt himself struggling up out of the void, battling, fighting for consciousness, then came a delicious sort of languor. If this was dying, it was very pleasant. Forms seemed to be flitting before his half-opened eyelids and the hum of voices seemed ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... beyond is darkness. Think what atoms we are; and we struggle so hard. Our life that seems to us so short—and so long! A thousand, perhaps ten thousand such, end to end, and we have the life of a world. And what is that? A cycle! A thing self-created, self-destructive: then of human life—nothingness. Oh, it's humorous! Our life, a ten thousandth part of that nothingness; and so full of tiny—great struggles and worries!" She was silent a moment, her throat trembling, a multitude of expressions ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... talked that day when she first met the children from the Flats. Two or three times she saw the children. But she passed them quickly by with scarcely a nod of greeting. And yet, the daughter of Adam Ward felt with increasing certainty that she could never be content with the busy nothingness which absorbed the lives of so many of her friends. Her father, since his retirement, seemed a little better. But she could not put out of her mind the memory of what she had seen. For her, the dreadful presence of the hidden thing ...
— Helen of the Old House • Harold Bell Wright
... spirits of the night flew past. I felt the wind of unseen wings lifting my hair; I heard the splash and gurgle of strange creatures swimming by. With my hands close locked on Barbara's arm, and wide eyes staring into nothingness, I waited for some human sound to break ...
— Margaret Tudor - A Romance of Old St. Augustine • Annie T. Colcock
... mysterious alchemy than the mixing of sun and shadow in the spaces of the air. Ishmael's keen eyes could see how a spider's thread, woven from one tall plant to another, and wavering ever so delicately in the faint breeze, was one moment lit here and there to a line of pure light that merged into nothingness and gleamed out again, while a moment later it might have vanished entirely or else shine its length. The midges, dancing in mid-air, were living sun-motes for one flash, then were swallowed up as suddenly as though they had slipped ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... destroy themselves, for if they are thoroughly bad no one believes them, and if they contain those pleasing half truths which a generation loves to suckle upon, why then after their vogue they will wither into nothingness. Such definitions are of the letter, and die by it, but stiff, clumsy definitions kill the spirit. To define a great man by a rigid formula is to sink to the lowest practice of the worst class rooms. To define a tendency so sharply that it cannot flow without breaking the definition, ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... less decided manner, and prescribed with much feeling the remedies most likely if not to cure, at least to prolong. These remedies were followed and gave relief; but at last the time had arrived when William was to feel that the greatest men finish like the humblest and to see the nothingness of what the ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... rings a bell and an aged beldame approaches, making a deep curtsy and offering me a beaker of milk, a crusty loaf, a few venison pasties, and a cold goose stuffed with humming birds. When I have reduced these to nothingness I ask if the yellow house on the outskirts of the village is still vacant, and the Colonel replies that it is, at which unexpected but hoped-for answer I fall into a deep swoon. When I awake the aged Colonel is bending over me, his long white goat's ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... coaching of my secretary, my ignorance must have been delightfully amusing to the royal idlers who had little other thought or purpose in life than this very round of complicated nothingness. But if I was a blundering amateur in all this, they were not so much discourteous as envious. They knew that I had won my position by my achievements as a chemist and in a vague way they understood ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... given now to a habit of feeling, now to a system of opinion; as the former it denotes a tendency to dwell on the dark or gloomy side of things, culminating in a sense of their vanity and nothingness, while in the latter it is applied to all systems of opinion which lay the finger on some black spot in the structure of the life of the world or of the universe, which so long as it remains is thought to ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... time to get a pint of bitter to wash it all down if I'm quick... Bah!" he broke out suddenly. "Good men build up Form and Forms—keep the Arts each after its kind—raise up the dikes so that we shan't all be swept away by night and nothingness—and these rats come nosing and burrowing and undermining it all!... ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... the fog reappeared towards sun sunset. At first, as a frail mist, through which the landscape looked colourless and blurred. Later it rose, growing in density, until all objects beyond a radius of some twenty paces were engulfed in its nothingness and lost. Later still—while Helen de Vallorbes paid her visit at Newlands—it grew denser yet, heavy, torpid, close yet cold, penetrated by earthy odours as the atmosphere of a vault, oppressive to the senses, baffling to ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... reproduce them. Here memory is defective. "I can remember so few of the actual words," she says. Nevertheless, she gives us a few samples, and they do not seem very "wonderful." Here are two of the said samples: "Live, live, live, remembering that night comes always quickly, and all is nothingness that dies with death!" "Fight the fight, darling; the sympathy of Christ is always with you, and every effort you make is heaping up treasure ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... could feel it crawl. If ever I came nearer to abject cowardice, I do not recall the instance; and yet it was not that I was afraid to die, for I had long since given myself up as lost—a few days of Caspak must impress anyone with the utter nothingness of life. The waters, the land, the air teem with it, and always it is being devoured by some other form of life. Life is the cheapest thing in Caspak, as it is the cheapest thing on earth and, doubtless, the cheapest ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... what is reckoned permissible by conventional morality; but even then her blood flowed as quietly as ever in her fascinatingly graceful, tranquil body. Sometimes coming out of her fragrant bath all warm and enervated, she would fall to musing on the nothingness of life, the sorrow, the labour, the malice of it.... Her soul would be filled with sudden daring, and would flow with generous ardour, but a draught would blow from a half-closed window, and Anna Sergyevna would shrink into herself, and feel plaintive and almost angry, ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... fled—the car is fled Into the light of heaven, and in their stead A sense of real things comes doubly strong, And, like a muddy stream, would bear along My soul to nothingness: but I will strive Against all doublings, and will keep alive The thought of that same chariot, and the strange Journey ...
— Poems 1817 • John Keats
... A void of nothingness was before his eyes. He saw its black emptiness change to pale green fire that swirled and fled before a large shape. The newcomer swept down like light itself. Softly green like the others, its rounded body was outlined in a huge circle ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... commanding knowledge of foreign affairs, now of such paramount importance to the State, and by his entire sympathy with the views of the King. The King hated Pulteney—had never forgiven him his championship of the Prince of Wales—and would be delighted to see him reduced to nothingness by a removal to the House of Lords. But if it was plain alike to such men of intellect as Walpole and Carteret, and to such stupid men as King George and the Duke of Newcastle, that removal to the House of Lords would mean political ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... Psyche into the dark infinite after the vanished Love. His friend is nowhere in his sight, and God is silent. Death, God's final compulsion to prayer, in its dread, its gloom, its utter stillness, its apparent nothingness, urges the cry. Meanings over the dead are mingled with profoundest questionings of philosophy, the signs of nature, and the story of Jesus, while now and then the star of the morning, bright Phosphor, ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... and whispering taffetas, the elevation of the brocades, the warm nothingness of the chiffons like wisps of fog, the rich dignity of the cloths, gave Kedzie rapture on rapture. Standing there with a burden of fabrics upon her and Lady Powell-Carewe kneeling at her feet pinning them up and tucking them here and there, Kedzie was reminded of those ancient days of six ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... I had had spiritual illuminations, mystical emotions, a morbid fondness for shutting myself up face to face with my past. I had attributed exceptional importance to myself and had come to think that I was more than other people. But this had gradually become submerged in the positive nothingness of every day. ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... us carry clear thinking with us. Cruelty implies the infliction of pain: and there can be no pain without feeling. What cruelty, then, can be inflicted on the dead, if they have done with feeling? Or what on the living, if they live in a happy delusion and pass into nothingness without discovering the cheat? Let us hold most firmly that there has been no cheat; but let us also be reasonable and admit that, if cheat there be, it cannot also be cruel, since everything that would make it a cheat would also blot out ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... vagueness in front of him, a sort of shimmer of nothingness, and out of that shimmer materialized ...
— Empire • Clifford Donald Simak
... purda, I suppose, and behind, are just discernible his wife and child. These wayfarers make me at once think of a new and original treatment for a holy family, but hold! These passages of light and colour, form fading into nothingness, are they not worth understanding alone, are they not more pure art without being nailed to ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... leafy pinnacles and sing Scornful of man, and from his toils aloof Whose heart's a haunted woodland whispering; Whose thoughts return on tempest-baffled wing; Who hears the cry of God in everything, And storms the gate of nothingness for proof. ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... hath bent him o'er the dead Ere the first day of death is fled; The first dark day of nothingness. The last of danger and distress: Before Decay's effacing fingers, Have swept the lines where beauty lingers, And mark'd the mild, angelic air, The rapture of repose that's there; The fix'd, yet tender traits that streak The languor of ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... altogether different with Jean-Baptiste. He approaches that life, and all its pretty nothingness, from a level no higher than its own; and beginning just where Antony Watteau leaves off in disdain, produces a solid and veritable likeness of it and of ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Horatio Pater
... Men must rise in an ever-ascending scale, like the ladder of St. Augustine, by which men, through stepping-stones of their dead selves rise to higher things; or those steps of Alciphron, which crumbled away into nothingness as fast as each foot-fall left them." Thus our very failures we may overrule and convert into stepping-stones to success. Lifted to a loftier sphere, to a nobler experience, we are apt to receive greater benefit than though we escaped disappointment ...
— A Fleece of Gold - Five Lessons from the Fable of Jason and the Golden Fleece • Charles Stewart Given
... She thrust herself between him and Fledra. The image that his heated brain had drawn up held out a tiny spirit babe, and so real was the apparition that he put out a trembling hand. For a moment he groped blindly for something tangible in the nothingness before him. Then, with a groan, he let his arm fall nerveless to his side. The vision disappeared, and Lem's presence and even Fledra's faded; for Lon again felt the agonizing cracking of his bones under the prison strait-jacket, ...
— From the Valley of the Missing • Grace Miller White
... alone. My brain is giddy. My pulse vibrates irregularly, and my heart beats with an audible distinctness. I am oppressed with a sense of my own nothingness—an atom, almost invisible, upon the ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... on Naples were repulsed, and their armies annihilated. In the spring of 1529 the Emperor got the upper hand in Lombardy also. How utterly then did the oft-proposed plan, of depriving him of the supreme dignity, sink into nothingness: he was stronger than ever in Italy. The Pope was fortunate in not having joined the allies more closely; the relations of the States of the Church with Tuscany made a union with the Emperor necessary; he had a horror of a new quarrel with him. And as the Emperor now took ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... thirteenth part of one half; for he is omnipotent, and a million of gold is no more to him than one farthing. Oh, ho! pray tell me who taught you to talk at this rate of the power and predestination of God, poor silly people? Peace, tush, st, st, st! fall down before his sacred face and own the nothingness of ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... beautiful And holy visions, that have passed away, And left no shadow of their loveliness On the dead waste of life. The spectre lifts The coffin-lid of Hope and Joy and Love, And bending mournfully above the pale, Sweet forms that slumber there, scatters dead flowers O'er what has passed to nothingness. ...
— Songs from the Southland • Various
... was God this awful time? Nowhere within the ken of the banished youth. In his own feeling Cosmo was outside the city of life—not even among the dogs—outside with bare nothingness—cold negation. Alas for him who had so lately offered to help another to pray, thinking the hour would never come to him when he could not pray! It had COME! He did not try to pray. The thought of prayer did not ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... bleatings, storm muffled bang, bang and thud of guns! Just for an instant, emerged from the mist on the skyline of the battlements the figure of a man in sheep-skin chaps, a riderless white horse, shadows of other men, the sheep in a living torrent pouring over into the nothingness of mist; then a boy, a little boy, riding hatless, craning far forward over the neck of his pinto pony, shouting, waving, screaming, trying to head the sheep back from the ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... killed her. He saw it all; she! there at his mercy. Tears swam and he trembled. Ah! the gracious lady! what divine condescension! what ineffable courtesy! But the artist in him was awakened almost at the same moment; his looks wandered in spite of her piteous candour and his own nothingness. Sandro the poet would have fallen on his face with an "Exi a me, nam peccator sum." Sandro the painter was different—no mercy there. He made a snatch at a carbon and raised his other hand with a kind of command—"Holy Virgin! what a ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... life. Instead of being its transfiguration and eternal Yea! In him war is declared on life, on nature, on the will to live! God becomes the formula for every slander upon the "here and now," and for every lie about the "beyond"! In him nothingness is deified, and the will ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... them through the open neckpiece of the suit, gave him the semblance of a mummy. The helmet clicked shut. Swallowing a lump that rose in his throat, Jim pulled open the door. A wave of Mercurians surged in, to be seared into nothingness by his weapon. He was in the doorway, his ray sweeping the ...
— The Great Dome on Mercury • Arthur Leo Zagat
... instruction. But the old school would receive new pupils and go on in the same humdrum way. There would be the same harsh teachers, the same ignorance and obstinacy, the same punishment and suffering. The worst of it is that Mercury does not seem exempt from the general curse of nothingness which seems to brood over all physical existence. There is no stability even in solar systems. Even we puny creatures can divine something of their birth and death. Out of whirling nebulae suns and planets ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... measure I cannot now imagine, for, in an instant, all my house of cards crumbled into nothingness. She knew me, this blue-eyed girl; knew me, and sought to aid my mission, this daughter of a loyalist, this lady of the Blended Rose. It was inconceivable, and yet a fact—my name had been whispered ...
— My Lady of Doubt • Randall Parrish
... the spring. But isn't it absurd to begin a diary a fortnight, perhaps, before death? What does it matter? And by how much are fourteen days less than fourteen years, fourteen centuries? Beside eternity, they say, all is nothingness—yes, but in that case eternity, too, is nothing. I see I am letting myself drop into metaphysics; that's a bad sign—am I not rather faint-hearted, perchance? I had better begin a description of some sort. It's damp and windy ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... to Earth and to the dead, and specially to thy husband King Darius, whom thou sawest in visions of the night, that he may send blessings from below to thy son, and turn away all trouble into darkness and nothingness." ...
— Stories from the Greek Tragedians • Alfred Church |
