"Inanity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of Highgate Hill in those years, looking down on London and its smoke tumult like a sage escaped from the inanity of life's battle, attracting towards him the thoughts of innumerable brave souls still engaged there. His express contributions to poetry, philosophy, or any specific province of human literature or enlightenment had been small ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... Sir Joshua's theory seems to rest on an inclined plane, and is always glad of an excuse to slide, from the severity of truth and nature, into the milder and more equable regions of insipidity and inanity; I am sorry to say so, but so ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... business, and withal not forget to spread my gown upon the bed, so that it might be sure to cover them both. These ape's tricks are the main of the effect, our fancy being so far seduced as to believe that such strange means must, of necessity, proceed from some abstruse science: their very inanity gives them weight and reverence. And, certain it is, that my figures approved themselves more venereal than solar, more active than prohibitive. 'Twas a sudden whimsey, mixed with a little curiosity, that made ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... insignificant when really he must have been a man of considerable character and attainments. Who would guess it who read all these trivial comments, these catalogues of what he had for dinner, these inane domestic confidences—all the more interesting for their inanity! The effect left upon the mind is of some grotesque character in a play, fussy, self-conscious, blustering with women, timid with men, dress-proud, purse-proud, trimming in politics and in religion, a garrulous gossip immersed always in trifles. And yet, though this was the ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... his seat, but did not deign a reply. The fire that had beamed in his eye gradually expired. His cheek resumed its wonted paleness; but he did not relapse into inanity. He sat with a steady, serene, patient look. Like one prepared not to contend, ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... Rabelaisian fay ce que vous voudras of the Franciscans of Medmenham Abbey with Sandwich, Wilkes, and others. At any rate, as their self-constituted laureate, he produced the following extraordinary song, which can be paralleled for inanity only by the stave he sang before Pitt in the Guildhall of London, as a means of attracting the notice of the Premier with a view to Parliament. The song is ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... behaviour was much the same as before; but her face was very different. There was light in it now, and signs of mental movement. The smooth forehead would be occasionally wrinkled, and she would fall into moods which were evidently not of inanity, but of abstracted thought. She took especial care that our eyes should not meet. If by chance they did, instead of sinking hers, she kept them steady, and opened them wider, as if she was fixing them on nothing at ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... which yield not to the tread of man. Alas! no bird of beauty dips its wing in these dead waters, and plumes itself for an aerial flight of love and joy. But the cold contraction chains down all the freer, beautiful life, into a hopeless, chilling inanity. ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... bath-tubs with wonder, albeit somewhat doubtfully. They discussed the library with appreciation, or lack of appreciation, according to their degrees of illiteracy or learning: the socialistic element condemned the inanity of the volumes selected; there were only histories, biographies, books of travel, foolish novels and the like—nothing to teach the manner by which the brotherhood of ...
— Making People Happy • Thompson Buchanan
... the century has brought to light many strange fads and senseless manias. This “descent” craze, however, surpasses them all in inanity. The keepers of insane asylums will tell you that one of the hopeless forms of madness is la folie des grandeurs. A breath of this delirium seems to be blowing over our country. Crowns and sceptres haunt the dreams of simple republican ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... Beethoven, or the majestic requiems of Mozart, rather than by our simple words. And yet they are our hearts' testimony to her in whose name we are assembled and, let us hope, made worthy. To us who believe that life reels not back from the white charger of Death towards the gulf of inanity and oblivion, there is a vivid realization that our words may be spoken to the conscious spirit; and we desire that, in the sacred name of truth, and with the love that comprehends and overcomes, we may speak ...
— Memories of Jane Cunningham Croly, "Jenny June" • Various
... and her sister Angelique attained an age to divide their mother's authority in the salon, its sentiment grew quintessential, and its taste was subtilised well-nigh to inanity. They censured Polyeucte; they found Chapelain's unhappy epic "perfectly beautiful, but excessively tiresome"; they laid their heads together over Descartes' Discours de la Methode, and profoundly admired the philosopher; ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... p. 270) had said that 'the characteristics of Addison's style are feebleness and inanity.' He was thus happily ridiculed by Person:—'Soon after the publication of Sir John's book, a parcel of Eton boys, not having the fear of God before their eyes, etc., instead of playing truant, robbing orchards, annoying poultry, or performing any other part of their school ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... the caverned lake, which no wind can stir; but that is the peace of stagnation. There is peace amongst the stones which have fallen and rolled down the mountain's side, and lie there quietly at rest; but that is the peace of inanity. There is peace in the hearts of enemies who lie together, side by side, in the same trench of the battle-field, the animosities of their souls silenced at length, and their hands no longer clenched in deadly enmity against each other; but that is the peace of death. If our ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... slanderer was allowed to escape after this valuable testimony. She comes into history like a will-o'-the-wisp, one of the marsh lights that mean nothing but putrescence and decay, and then flickers out again with her false witness into the wastes of inanity. That she should have been treated so leniently and Jeanne so cruelly! say the historians. Reason good: she was nothing, came of nothing, and meant nothing. It is profane to associate Jeanne's pure and beautiful name with that of a mountebank. This is the only ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... said I, wrathfully. "What are you to her? Do you suppose she takes you for a symbol? I wish to Heaven she did. A round cipher of naught, the symbol of inanity. She takes you for an honourable gentleman. I've known the child since she was born. As good a little girl as you ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... it got before it was drowned in a deluge of laughter and applause. She had made, as Gilmore said to his wife behind the curtain, a "ten-strike." Her hearers did not pause an instant to determine whether the utterance was wit or humor or pure inanity. It fitted their mood; fitted it better than the actor or Hugh had believed it could. To the company's notion it was good nonsense offsetting and overpowering an otherwise invincible bad nonsense and snatching from it all right of argument, sympathy, or judicial appeal; laughing it out of court, ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... poet who sometimes nodded. . . . Coleridge was a muddle-brained metaphysician who, by some strange freak of fortune, turned out a few real poems amongst the dreary flood of inanity which was his wont. . . . I have been through the poems, and find that the only ones which have any interest for me are: (1) 'Ancient Mariner'; (2) 'Christabel'; (3) 'Kubla Khan'; and (4) the poem called 'Love'" (Mackail's "Life of Morris," ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... form of speech with which we alone are conversant. Our smiles betray our instincts and our burdens; they reflect our virtues and our inanity. ...
— The Dangerous Age • Karin Michaelis
... often as outrageous as these would be. I never conceived people could be so stupid at combining ideas, even upon this least abstruse of subjects; and you would think, to hear these fine ladies talk the inanity they do about their own clothes, now they are compelled to think about them for themselves, that they have no natural perceptions of even color, form, or proportion. The fact is that even their dressing-brains are turned over to their French milliners and lady's-maids. ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... to the confusion of controversies, the cowardice of conventionality, the vanity of declarations, the inanity of proofs. He saw himself bruised and thrust aside by the reflections of everybody, obliged henceforward to advance or retire, dispute or ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... into a whirling story. The villain was a traveller in buttons—buttons! To be wronged by a traveller in diamonds might have its compensations—but buttons! Linen buttons, bone buttons, brass buttons, trouser buttons! To be a traveller in the inanity of buttonholes was the only lower degradation. His name was Bondon—he uttered it scathingly, as if to decline from a Bocardon to a Bondon was unthinkable. This Bondon was a regular client of the hotel, and such a client!—who never ordered a bottle of vin cachete or coffee ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... indifferent success, for the girl's thoughts invariably were elsewhere engaged. On this particular afternoon Carmen was lost in contemplation of the gorgeous dress, the lavish display of jewelry, and the general inanity of conversation; and her score was pitiably low. The following morning, to her great astonishment, she received a bill from the practical Mrs. Gannette for ten dollars to cover her losses at the game. For a long time the bewildered girl mused over it. Then ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... that the patriotic and brave Senator Wade, disgusted with the slowness and inanity of the administration, exclaimed, "I do not wonder that people desert to Jeff. Davis, as he shows brains; I may desert myself." And truly, Jeff. Davis and his gang ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... never disheartening,—always an exciting, encouraging lesson. ——'s kind words on intellectual presence of mind, and his animating example of it, have determined me to make a vigorous effort over my own sloth and inanity. I believe the first thing is to be always conscious of what I am thinking of, and never to let my mind run at loose ends ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall
... stock-jobbers, such as Advice to the October Club, Public Spirit of the Whigs, &c., the Virtues of Sid Hamet, The Magician's Wand (directed against Godolphin); his Polite Conversations and Directions to Servants are savage attacks on the inanity of society small-talk and the greed of the menials of the period. But why prolong the list? From the Drapier's Letters, directed against a supposed fraudulent introduction of a copper currency known as "Wood's ...
— English Satires • Various
... will have to be investigated. All that will have to be stopped.... And it makes another reason why it is necessary to fight today, to fight to the death. For these Germans will understand the inanity of their Machiavellian scheming and of their spy system only when they shall see these methods fall to pieces, when they shall see their ...
— Fighting France • Stephane Lauzanne
... not mean fine. Airs and conceit he despised, as much as he disliked vulgarity. Affectation was under awe before him from an instinctive perception of his powers of ridicule. He could not endure, in favour of any pretensions of birth, fortune, or fashion, the stupidity of a formal circle, or the inanity of commonplace conversation. . .. Sometimes, perhaps, he went too far, and at this period of his life was too fastidious in his choice of society; or when he did go into mixed company, if he happened to be suddenly struck with any extravagance or meanness of fashion, he ...
— Richard Lovell Edgeworth - A Selection From His Memoir • Richard Lovell Edgeworth
... to fascinate him; do not condemn yourself to live only by halves, because if you showed too much animation some pragmatical thing in breeches might take it into his pate to imagine that you desired to dedicate your life to inanity. Write again soon, for I feel rather ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... Inanity] could not continue and did not subsist, because it had no human conformation nor the system of the Balance, the Sephiroth being points, one below the other. The first Adam [Microprosopos, as distinguished from Macroprosopos, the first ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... enjoyment. Then she falls in love with this imminent danger, this sword of Damocles hung over her head by you yourself, thus preferring the delirious agonies of such a passion, to that conjugal inanity which is worse to her than death, to that indifference which is less a sentiment than the absence ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... shoulder reassuringly. "That's the proper thing for a lover to think!" she said with cheerful, commonplace inanity. She did not notice that he shrank from her hand, because she now sprang up, crying, "But where's Judy? Where ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... weakness, instead of the stern strength of the house of Anjou, had descended to him; and though he had what Fuller calls "a handsome man-case," his fair and beautiful face was devoid of the resolute and fiery expression of his father, and showed somewhat of the inanity of regular features, without a spirit to illuminate them. Gentle, fond of music, dancing, and every kind of sport, he had little turn for state affairs; and like his grandfather, Henry III., but with more constancy, he clung to any one who ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... pursuit of a butterfly. The idea opened up to Mr. Anstey a comic vista, which he has developed for our delectation. The songs and dances, with their words and directions, are for the most part screamingly funny, consisting partly in the perfectly realised absurdity and inanity of the performance, and partly in that quality of absolute truthfulness to life which we are forced to realise in the presentation of them. Laughter is often produced by the mere faithfulness of an imitation, whether ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... might, as a rule, be called with equal propriety millinery dramas. In other words, their success is generally due to their costumes. In this respect they afford a marked contrast to ballet spectacles. The latter give us inanity without clothes; the former, inanity in particularly gorgeous clothes. Which, again, leads to the further remark that the difference between the two styles of inanity is, after all, a clothes thing. This ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 9, May 28, 1870 • Various
... The more the better. They are more serviceable than a conscience, in which I presume you're likewise lacking, because you don't have to use them. A conscience is an immediate annoyance, whereas ideals are charming procrastinations. They excuse the inanity of the present. Good Lord, what do you think about all day without ideals to ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... inanity of most opera librettos, was touched by these words as if there had been something pathetic in this readiness of response; as if she had heard a starved man talking of the delight of a crust of dry bread. "I suppose you forgot yourself in that ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... pleasures. It belongs to material growths to ripen, loosen, decay; but what is there in sensation, reflection, memory, volition, to crumble in pieces and rot away? Why should the power of hope, and joy, and faith, change into inanity and oblivion? What crucible shall burn up the ultimate of force? What material processes shall ever disintegrate the simplicity of spirit? Earth and plant, muscle, nerve, and brain, belong to one sphere, and are subject to the temporal fates that rule ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... your imaginings: Gift me with Beauty if you like, or gift me with Brains, but do not make the crude masculine mistake of gifting me with both. Thought furrows faces you know, and after Adolescence only Inanity retains its heavenly smoothness. Beauty even at its worst is a gorgeously perfect, flower-sprinkled lawn over which the most ordinary, every-day errands of life cannot cross without scarring. And brains at their best are only a ploughed field teeming always and forever with the worries of incalculable ...
— Molly Make-Believe • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... into her husband's presence she had nothing to say, and Milton, the theorist, discovered that what he had mistaken for the natural reticence and bashfulness of maidenhood was mere inanity and lack of ideas. But the loneliness of the poor country girl, shut up in a student's den, is a deal more touching than the scholar's wail about "the silent and insensate" wife. The girl was being deprived ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... the ladies have a singularly pretty way of saying the most biting things in a smooth and unconcerned fashion when they find a dunce beginning to talk platitudes or to patronize his partner; but the middle generation are unspeakably inane; and the worst is that they regard their inanity as a decided sign of distinction. A grave man who adds a sense of humour to his gravity may find a sort of melancholy entertainment if he listens to a pair of thorough-paced "Society" gentry. He will learn that you do not go to a "function" to please others or to ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... this moment ready to help women to enter wider fields of labor, because, on the one side, the destitution and vice they have helped to create appalls their consciousness; and, on the other, a profane inanity stands a perpetual blasphemy in the ...
— A Practical Illustration of Woman's Right to Labor - A Letter from Marie E. Zakrzewska, M.D. Late of Berlin, Prussia • Marie E. Zakrzewska
... is perhaps not in the power of a man whose attention has been divided by diversity of pursuits, and who has not been accustomed to derive from others much of his happiness, to image to himself such helpless destitution, such dismal inanity. Every object of pleasing contemplation is at once snatched away, and the soul finds every receptacle of ideas empty, or filled only with the memory of joys that can return no more. All is gloomy privation, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... thus coming on me suddenly, struck me as with a thunderbolt. His lightning opened the heaven of art to me with a sublime crash, and lighted up its farthest depths. I recognized true dramatic grandeur, beauty, and truth. I measured at the same time the boundless inanity of the notions of Shakespeare in France, spread abroad ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... moments by straight strokes of a certain length on the wall, until the growth of the sum of straight strokes, arranged in triangles, has become a mastering purpose? Do we not wile away moments of inanity or fatigued waiting by repeating some trivial movement or sound, until the repetition has bred a want, which is incipient habit? That will help us to understand how the love of accumulating money grows an absorbing passion in men whose imaginations, even in the very beginning ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... our knowledge of so important a period in Voltaire's life should be extremely incomplete. Carlyle, who gave a hasty glance at it in his life of Frederick, declared that he could find nothing but 'mere inanity and darkness visible'; and since Carlyle's day the progress has been small. A short chapter in Desnoiresterres' long Biography and an essay by Churton Collins did something to co-ordinate the few known facts. Another ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... tragical anticlimax of so many a passion, and now the inanity of human nature was revealed to his successor, to whom infinite power ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... herself to express a decided interest in his doings, and never once throwing on him the burden of a conversational deadlift in the manner with which a girl knows how to discourage all but the dullest of bores. Now and then, indeed, when Mark's conversation showed symptoms of the occasional inanity common to most men who talk much, she did not spare him; but this was due to a jealous anxiety on her part that he should keep up to his own standard, and if she had not liked him she would not have taken the trouble. ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... me," she added coldly as I was about to utter some inanity. "I desire to be certain of one thing while there is time, namely, that my wishes respecting the disposition of my body shall ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... 'Orphic Sayings' came; those most unmeaning and witless effusions—we cannot say of the brain, for the smallest modicum of brains would have rendered their appearance an impossibility—but of mere intellectual inanity.' The American Euphuists, being possessed of the demon of affectation, strive to set themselves apart from the common herd, imagine that they are inhabitants of a sublimated ether, and look down with pitying contempt ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... bigoted and unreasonable, but he must be an optimist whilst pursuing his object. He must believe in life and in the inherent goodness of the earth. He must be a stranger to the dyspeptic melancholy through which Carlyle saw the world as a "noisy inanity" and life as an incomprehensible monstrosity. Macbeth is called to denounce life as "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury," and "signifying nothing." Macbeth must be shunned by the reformer as the monk repels the visits of Satan in the desert. He must share the hopefulness ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... human requirements and enjoyments. Betrayed by appetite he had been driven forth by the prayers of the abbot, and solaced by his petitions for the future life. Deign to let the matter rest there, and not pursue him into the inanity, the nothingness of Nirvana. To this the practiced ear of the holy Bankei gave deep thought. This fellow already had forced the unhappy Kakunai to follow in his tracks. What might he not do to others in whom the abbot had far greater interest? "To such wickedness the gift of Nirvana ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... been the silly, the childish things which they were for a long time described as being; had they been really distinguished from the compositions of other poets merely by meanness of language and inanity of thought; had they indeed contained nothing more than what is found in the parodies and pretended imitations of them; they must have sunk at once, a dead weight, into the slough of oblivion, and have dragged the preface along with them. But ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... fatui of imagination; meadows after all so broad, that did not metaphysics 'teach man his tether,' they would seem illimitable. The book of nature is not spread before us, turning leaf after leaf at every sunrise, with new delineations on every page, to be stared at with vacant inanity, or criticized with imbecile verbosity. The rivulet does not tinkle and the sky does not look blue that people may feed the ear alone with the one, or satisfy the eye alone with the other; the nerves which carry the sensation to the brain, flutter ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... world had been by what Sir Walter Scott calls the "huge folios of inanity" which had preceded him, the work was hailed with delight. There was a little affectation; but the sentiment was moral and natural. Ladies carried Pamela about in their rides and walks. Pope, near his end, said it was a better moral teacher than sermons: ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... serious again. Does he realize the inanity of the hypothesis I try to pass off on him? Does he think I know more than I will say? However this may be, he accepts my professed ...
— Facing the Flag • Jules Verne
... always either foolish, fatuous politicians or frightened, mystified bourgeois; yet they help him to give us a strong sense of the nature of man. They are some times so serious that they are almost tragic the look of the particular pretension, combined with inanity, is carried almost to madness. There is a magnificent drawing of the series of "Le Public du Salon," old classicists looking up, horrified and scandalized, at the new romantic work of 1830, in which the faces have an appalling gloom of mystification and platitude. We feel that Daumier ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... the very atmosphere. Christiania is in all respects the antipodes of San Francisco. A Californian could scarcely endure an existence in such a place for six weeks. He would go stark mad from sheer inanity. Beautiful as the scenery is, and pleasantly as the time passed during my brief sojourn, it was not without a feeling of relief that I took my departure in the cars ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... Webster, s.v. {a type of paint} tinglish: sharp? Zeno: founder of the Stoic philosophy. Carlino: some expressionless picture by Carlo, or Carlino, Dolci. His works show an extreme finish, often with no end beyond itself; some being, to use Ruskin's words, "polished into inanity". ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... of Oken, notwithstanding his acknowledged genius, is almost as metaphysical as Hegel, and there is in France a quite recent revival of the Animism of Stahl. These metaphysical explanations, besides their inanity, did serious harm, by directing the course of positive scientific inquiry into wrong channels. There was indeed nothing to prevent investigating the mode of action of the supposed plastic or vital force ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... a few questions suggested for you to answer—as answer I know you will. It is almost a Shame to put you to it by such a piece of inanity as this letter. But it is written: it is 10 p.m. A Pipe—and then to Bed—with what Appetite ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... amusement or profit, jumping from one to the other and extending her range; and this would doubtless be her occupation more and more as she acquired ease and confidence. The expression that came nearest belonging to her, as it were, was the one that came nearest being a blank—an air of inanity when she forgot herself in some act of sincere attention. Then her eye was heavy and her mouth betrayed a commonness; though it was perhaps just at such a moment that the fine line of her head told most. She had looked slightly bete even when Sherringham, on their first meeting ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... Italy, and Switzerland.... They go back, without knowing it, to those theories of enlightened despotism which flourished at the end of the eighteenth century in the courts of Vienna, St. Petersburg, Madrid and Lisbon, the ridiculous inanity of which was sufficiently well demonstrated ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... with the good sense, taste, and information which their conversation exhibited; and it seemed to be their object to unite the character of men of fashion and lovers of the polite arts. A fine gentleman, bred up in the thorough idleness and inanity of pursuit, which I understand is absolutely necessary to the character in perfection, might in all probability have traced a tinge of professional pedantry which marked the barrister in spite of his ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... The flippancy of the lives around her, the inanity of her relatives' pursuits, their heedlessness of those inner qualities which make the real—indeed, the only considerable difference between man and man, could but fret, and mortify, and abash a heart which, in the absence of any religious faith, ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... acting a charade to making a pun, does consist in restraining one's nine hundred and ninety-nine serious selves and letting the fool loose. The dullness of the millionaire joke is much deeper. It is not silly at all; it is solely stupid. It does not consist of ingenuity limited, but merely of inanity expanded. There is considerable difference between a wit making a fool of himself and a fool making ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... literature, explored its mazy windings, and who is thoroughly and radically fortified, as being encompassed with the impenetrable shield of genuine science. This red, hot, fiery, unguarded locust, in the inanity of his mind's incomprehensibleness, has not only incurred my displeasure by his satirical dogged Lampoons, etc., but the abhorrence, animosity, and holy indignation of many who move in the high circle, as well as the ineffable ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... Carriage after carriage rolls away—Sir Victor and Lady Helena shake hands with this pretty, well-bred Miss Darrell, and go too. She sees Charley linger to the last moment, by fascinating Mrs. Featherbrain, whispering the usual inanity, in her pretty pink ear. He leads her to her carriage, when it stops the way, and he and the millionnaire's wife vanish in ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... profitless as column after column of this reading. These "items" have very little interest, except to those who already know the facts; but those concerned like to see them in print, and take the newspaper on that account. This sort of inanity takes the place of reading-matter that might be of benefit, and its effect must be to belittle and contract the mind. But this is not the most serious objection to the publication of these worthless details. It cultivates self-consciousness in the community, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... his gay nothings, nothing was replied, Or something which was nothing, as urbanity Required. Aurora scarcely looked aside, Nor even smiled enough for any vanity. The Devil was in the girl! Could it be pride, Or modesty, or absence, or inanity? ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... vitae. The inanity of sublunary things has afforded a theme to philosophers, moralists, and divines, from the earliest records of antiquity; "Vanity of vanities!" says the preacher, "all is vanity!" Nor is there any one, I suppose, who has passed the meridian of life, who has not at some moments felt the nihility ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... in my memory and writing down in a book all that I had said to her or she to me, weighing and probing the scope and effect of the words that had been uttered, laying plans for future methods of advance, noting actual victories and defeats, pondering over this inanity, bending over all this abnormality, like a strategist who, bending over the map, marks with his nail the movements of troops, the carrying or ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... all like a dream, that visit to the old places. I did not feel then that I was lonely, that I had come out from the world into a desolate place. I appreciated my loss of sympathy, but I put it down to the general inanity of things. Re-entering my room seemed like the recovery of reality. There were the things I knew and loved. There stood the apparatus, the experiments arranged and waiting. And now there was scarcely a difficulty left, ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... falling into degradation: he cannot elevate her without at the same time elevating himself. Let us cast our eyes over the globe! Let us observe those two great divisions of the human race, the East and the West. Half the old world remains in a state of inanity, under the oppression of a rude civilization: the women there are slaves; the other advances in equalization and intelligence: the women ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... on the earth, or in the depths of the boundless ocean, whether animal or vegetable, draw far the greater part of their nutriment. We can never reach the surface of this atmospheric ocean, for that would be for us a region of inanity and death; but there is scarcely a doubt that we shall freely use it in the future for purposes of locomotion, at the same time that we breathe and assimilate it as the very pabulum and substance ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... at the worst moments Bunter really desired to drown Captain Johns. I fancy that all his disordered imagination longed for was merely to stop the ghostly inanity of the skipper's talk. ...
— Tales Of Hearsay • Joseph Conrad
... the galleys of the law, when I was cooped up for eight hours out of the twenty-four with nincompoops of the first water, I saw queer characters enough to convince myself that all is not dead-level even in obscure places, and that in the flattest inanity you may chance upon an angle. Yes, dear boy, such and such a philistine is to such another ...
— The Firm of Nucingen • Honore de Balzac
... against another, but they take no account of me, not even in my own council. My mother, in the midst of so many contending elements, is, nevertheless, the strongest among them; she has just proved to me the inanity of my plans. We are surrounded by rebellious subjects who defy the law. The axe of Louis XI. of which you speak, is lacking to us. Parliament would not condemn the Guises, nor the king of Navarre, nor ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... the way of consequences for life of this radical difference of outlook will only become apparent in my later lectures. I wish meanwhile to close this lecture by showing that rationalism's sublimity does not save it from inanity. ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... be said, that the minds of the uncultivated order are not generally in this state of utter inanity during their common employments; but are often awake and busy enough in recollections, fancies, projects, and the tempers appropriate; and that they abundantly show this when they stop sometimes in their work to talk, or talk as they are proceeding in it. So much the stronger, ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... us; for they would shoot their ideas in through my eyes—smile, or look grave—and nod, assent, or shake the head, as various thoughts passed through my mind. After the first visits, I ceased to use articulated language; it was a joyless communion, a languid inanity, and I felt as if my own soul was no longer a dweller in its earthly tabernacle, but held a mysterious middle state between life and death. In vain I endeavoured to exert my energies. I left my bed, and began to move about; still this new torment clung to me. I possessed a strange power. I had ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... an additional reason for making a collection of the incredibly curious literature of Homoeopathy before that pseudological inanity has faded out ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... until they were brought out. If he had been my child, he should have been soundly punished and sent to bed for whining and pulling at his father's coat-tails; but Mr. Anstice is amiable to the verge of inanity where Jimmy is concerned, and after saying, "My dear!" and "Yes, in a minute," he allowed himself to be fairly pulled out of his chair and into the house, from which he shortly emerged with Jimmy, bearing between them an oblong pine ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... cochlea, which it is said hangs within the ear as a bell, and is beat upon by the air. Alcmaeon, that the vacuity that is within the ear makes us to have the sense of hearing, for the air forcing a vacuum gives the sound; every inanity affords a ringing. Diogenes the air which exists in the head, being struck upon by the voice gives the hearing. Plato and his followers, the air which exists in the head being struck upon, is reflected to the principal part of the soul, and this ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... to break through all such snares of falsehood and vanity, and build their own foundation in spite of us; whereas if, as in cases numbering millions against units, the natural gifts were too weak to do this, could any thing come of such training but utter inanity and spuriousness of the whole man? But if we had sense, should we not rather restrain and bridle the first flame of invention in early youth, heaping material on it as one would on the first sparks and tongues of a fire which we desired ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... nothing, no thing, mind, nor power. As manifested by mankind it stands for a lie, nothing claiming to be something, - for lust, dishonesty, 330:30 selfishness, envy, hypocrisy, slander, hate, theft, adultery, murder, dementia, insanity, inanity, devil, hell, with all the etceteras that ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... accuses Serbia of having prepared and carried out the crime of Sarajevo. Such an accusation of a crime at common law, launched against a whole people and a whole State, aroused, by its evident inanity, widespread sympathy for Serbia throughout all classes ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... for. I'm about to be honoured with a blooming medical certificate to that effect. As a soldier, I'm extinct—from this time forth for evermore. You see before you the wraith of a Might-Have-Been. After that gold-medal exhibition of inanity, kindly produce said pegs!" ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... Meredith; a little Browning—only half understood at best; a little scandal; a great deal of orange pekoe, sipped out of old Worcester teacups of royal blue or flowered Swansea; an hour's letter-writing on the last fashionable note-paper; elegantly-worded inanity, delicately penned in a flowing Italian hand, with long loops to the Y's and G's, and a serpentine curve at the end ...
— Vixen, Volume II. • M. E. Braddon
... Century is quite confiscate, fallen bankrupt, given up to the auctioneers;—Jew-brokers sorting out of it at this moment, in a confused distressing manner, what is still valuable or salable. And, in fact, it lies massed up in our minds as a disastrous wrecked inanity, not useful to dwell upon; a kind of dusky chaotic background, on which the figures that had some veracity in them—a small company, and ever growing smaller as our demands rise in strictness—are delineated for us.—"And yet it is the Century of our own Grandfathers?" cries the reader. ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle
... have survived. Yet there are two, the Leg and the Bell, to which there are allusions in seventeenth century records. There is one reference in that "Parliamentary Diary" supposed to have been written by Thomas Burton, the book which Carlyle characterized as being filled "with mere dim inanity and moaning wind." This chronicler, under date December 18th, 1656, tells how he dined with the clothworkers at the Leg, and how "after dinner I was awhile at the Leg with Major-General Howard and Mr. Briscoe." ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... me, or is this the Jagson whose name in its inanity is so appropriate to the bearer? I am eager to know if you still devote upon the ungrateful arts talents which were more profitably ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... completely self-possessed and ironical with regard to his story. His theme is the idle love whose origin is explained by Ovid; his personages are nothing to him but the instruments of the symphony which he composes and directs: sopra lor vanit che par persona, over and through their graceful inanity, passes the stream of sentiment, the shifting, flickering light which the Provenal author has borrowed from Ovid and transferred for his own purposes to his own time. It is perhaps the first complete modern appropriation of classical examples in literary art; for the poem of Flamenca is classical ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... With heroes simple-souled, He looks no longer sourly On men of normal mould, But, purged of mental vanity And erudite inanity, The clay of his humanity Is turning ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, June 7, 1916 • Various
... good, you know, to have a nice round shocking; but Ernest was evidently not inclined to show fight for her sole gratification, and so she proceeded to her alternative amusement of getting Lord Connemara to display the full force of his own inanity. This was an easy and unending source of innocent enjoyment to Lady Hilda, enhanced by the fact that she knew her father and mother were anxious to see her Countess of Connemara, and that they would be annoyed by her public exposition of that eligible young man's intense ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... complied, accompanying herself on the ukulele, she suggested his weird "Cowboy's Lament." In some inexplicable way of love, she had come to like her husband's one song. Because he sang it, she liked its inanity and monotonousness; and most of all, it seemed to her, she loved his hopeless and adorable flatting of every note. She could even sing with him, flatting as accurately and deliciously as he. Nor did she undeceive ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... the study of that by virtue of which the characteristic in things is a positive principle, must preserve him from emptiness, weakness, inward inanity, before he can venture to aim, by ever higher combination and final melting together of manifold forms, to reach the extremest beauty in works uniting the highest simplicity ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... him with amazing inanity that his opinion of her was unreliable; and, contented, he lightly pursued his admiration of what he called her boreal charm. At intervals she responded appropriately and proceeded with breakfast. She had entered a region of dispassionate consideration, her ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... firmament, but falls from the firmament to man. God does not ascend as the vapor, but descends as the light. This is the wide meaning of this uncanny poem. It is the sanity of the leading poet of the nineteenth century, and the greatest poet since Shakespeare, who saw clearly the inanity of so-called scientific conclusions and godless theories of the evolution of mankind. Mankind can not create God. God creates mankind. All the man-made gods are fashioned after the similitude of Caliban's Setebos. They are grotesque, carnal, devilish. Paganism was but an installment ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... that he could not afford, to entertain people that he would rather not see, to indulge his children in vanities and follies against his better judgment, to desert his plain duty to his Church in favor of some social inanity. She was always tempting, caressing, and charming him with playful banter when he would be serious, weakening him when he would be strong, coaxing him to play when he would have worked. He had been as wax in her hands; but hitherto ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley
... orders to four or five other people and continued calmly, "I am not conducting a school of journalism; if I were I should have a special duncecap imported solely for your use. The lowest copyboy knows better than to utter such an inanity. You will find the Francis and interview her. I'm busy. Get the hell out of here and handle those files carefully if you value that cadaver you probably think of as the ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... letting them come out to fascinate him; do not condemn yourself to live only by halves, because if you showed too much animation some pragmatical thing in breeches might take it into his pate to imagine that you designed to dedicate your life to his inanity. Still, a composed, decent, equable deportment is a capital treasure to a woman, and that you possess. Write again soon, for I feel rather fierce, and ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... say again: The great silent men! Looking round on the noisy inanity of the world, words with little meaning, actions with little worth, one loves to reflect on the great Empire of Silence. The noble silent men, scattered here and there, each in his own department; ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... with the rehearsal of a comedy, called The Election, consisting of a series of broadly humorous scenes in which the open and diverse bribery at elections, the equally open immorality of fashionable town life, the connivance of country dames, and the inanity of the beau monde, are satirised. The country Mayor, the Ministerial candidates and the Opposition squire drink, bribe and are bribed with complete impartiality. A scene devoted to the political young lady of the day affords opportunity for a hit ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... once the horror of the moment is over, when one sees its place taken by only the memory of those who have gone, there is a kind of sweetness in the thought of what really exists. In these solemn woods one realises the inanity of sepulchres and the pomp of funerals. The souls of the brave have no need of all ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... later she came back, accompanied by the two old people. There was an expression of anxious watchfulness and aimless attention in both faces, such as deaf people often have, and which is apt to degenerate into a look of inanity and distrust. It is a very true saying that when a husband and wife have lived many years together, and have shared each other's thoughts and interests, they at last grow to be like one another in appearance, and even when the features are different ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... there ever such a poor sneaking scarecrow of an idol as that gaping straw-stuffed inanity you worship, and call honor? It is not Honor; it is but your honor. It is neither gold, nor silver, nor honest copper, but a vile, worthless pinchbeck. It may be, however, for I have not the honor to belong to any of your clubs, that you no longer insult the ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... with the calf in the plea for supper, a cord was slipped about its neck and it was presented in due form. In order that she might not be harassed by its tendance, a gigantic Scotch herder, six feet six inches high and twenty-five years of age, showed how far involuntary inanity can coexist with presumptive sanity as he led it about, the creature holding back heavily at every step and now and again tangling itself, its cord, and its disconcerted bleats about its conductor's long and stalwart legs. Another of ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... service," I put in with the usual inanity that is essential to the maintenance of ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... only comfort is, that the histories of some men's lives, and perhaps of some men who have made a noise in the world, are in reality as absolute blanks as the travels of our hero. As, therefore, we shall make sufficient amends in the sequel for this inanity, we shall hasten on to matters of true importance and immense greatness. At present we content ourselves with setting down our hero where we took him up, after acquainting our reader that he went abroad, staid seven years, and then ...
— The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great • Henry Fielding
... being, of course, at this time entirely unaware of the fact that the girl was Parker's wife. He found her sitting in a rocking chair in a comfortable, well-furnished room, and reading a magazine. Assuming an expression of sheepish inanity he informed her that he was an old pal of "Jim's" who had been so unfortunate as to be locked up in the same cell with him at Headquarters, and that the latter was in desperate need of morphine. ...
— True Stories of Crime From the District Attorney's Office • Arthur Train
... the rugged Iconoclast turn in his grave. Messrs. Gray and Reedman may rely upon it that Charles Bradlaugh is not able to enter No. 139 Pershore-road, Birmingham; if he were, he would descend in swift wrath upon his silly traducers, who have put their own inanity into his mouth, making the great, virile Atheist talk like a little, flabby Spiritualist after an orgie ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... vanity; the hilarity of youth, folly; he considers how soon the gloom of death must overshadow the one and disappoint the other. The world presents little to attract and nothing to delight him. A few more years of infirmity, inanity and pain must consign him to idiocy or the grave. Yet this was the gay, the generous, the high-souled boy who beheld the ascending path of life strewn with flowers without a thorn. Such is human life; but such cannot be the ultimate destinies ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 2, February 1886 • Various
... still goes to press and the public sees no change; but we, who worked beside him, see it nightly. By twelve o'clock on a busy night, nervous, drawn faces surround the central desk, and profanity is snapped crossly back and forth. There is no alleviation of cheerful inanity. Presently somebody looks up, remarking, "I wish Bobbie Barton was back." And somebody else replies with profane asperity and lax grammar, "I wish he was!" Bobbie, meanwhile has become a lawyer, and can now afford a whole plate of frankfurters ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... Woke to her love with sere and sickly hope; As some departed June, won with the sighs Of waning Winter, turns and spends a day For very pity with the lonely eld, Who greets her sunny visit with a glance Of cold inanity, and strives to smile. O had I known this little hour of time When life was young—or knew it not at all! Then my heart's buoyance, at such love as her's, Had blossom'd brightly—as the merry May Skips from the golden South with balmy breath, Breathing upon the dark and ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... resemble fires, which are friendly and beneficial when under proper direction, but if suffered to blaze without restraint, they carry devastation along with them, and, if totally extinguished, leave the benighted mind in a state of cold and comfortless inanity. ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More
... speechless with amazement. Miss Mewlstone's face was crimson; her small eyes were sparkling with angry excitement: all her softness and gentle inanity had vanished. ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... altogether passive. Isaac D'Israeli denounced the fraud in his Curiosities of Literature; but he and others did their protesting gently. The fraud looked to the expert too shamefaced to merit a vigorous onslaught. He imagined the spurious epistle must die of its own inanity. In this he miscalculated the credulity of the general reader. "Grenovicus" of the Gentleman's ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... so also had the younger and emotional Chris. The young fellow was in love with her! It was that which had stimulated his recovery, and she was wondering if he, the doctor, had observed it. He smiled back the superior smile of our sex in moments of great inanity, and poor Miss Trotter believed he understood her. A few days after this, she noticed that Frida Jansen was wearing a pearl ring and a somewhat ostentatious locket. She remembered now that Mr. Bilson ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... he wished to arrive at an honest decision, but he did not wish it to be different from hers. However, he could not say he liked any of the plays. Half of them were modern, half Oriental; all artificial and stilted, and full of long-winded inanity. Eventually he selected one of the Oriental, which he thought would at any rate give Cleo an opportunity of displaying her dresses—to such Machiavellian extent had she already influenced him. To his delight, she declared that his choice was hers. He timidly ventured ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... say what he means; and then,' meaning, in his will, 'it comes too late for him to enjoy the credit of it.' I could not help laughing when he told me how they thought it necessary to carry their follies with them to the grave, and to leave the record of their inanity behind them in black and white; some stipulating that their clothes or other treasures should be burnt with them, others that their graves should be watched by particular servants, or their monuments crowned with flowers;—sapient ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... Thackeray called him, is sometimes unpardonable; and if Froude had suppressed those passages he would have done well. His own personal conduct is a lesson to us all, and that lesson is in Froude's pages for every one to read. "What a noisy inanity is this world," wrote Carlyle in his diary at the opening of the year 1835. Without the few great men who, like Carlyle, can lift themselves and others above it, it would be still noisier, ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... one seldom kicks at her without getting sore toes. True enough, there do appear cases where it seems to work pretty well; but when they are inquired into, it is generally found either that the husband is a simpleton, submitting by mere inanity, or a man who has resisted to the uttermost, and is at last crumpled up by pure "Caudlish" iteration and perseverance. How Tammas took ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... can give, except fame, which was beyond his reach, and, at forty years of age, he had a decided preference for old-fashioned people. His placid disposition liked their quiet ways and abhorred all sorts of trivial excitement; he was a man who was intimately conscious of the inanity of most forms of amusement, and of the emptiness of most kinds of sensations. The cold, still depths of his heart could not be warmed to a pleasurable heat by the small emotions which the world covets, and so eagerly pursues. He sometimes wondered ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... felt himself beginning to be? She supplied a deficiency in the youth. He was growing and uncertain: she was set and decisive. In his soul he adored the extreme refinement of woman; even up to the thin edge of inanity (which neighbours what the philosopher could tell him if he would, and would, if it were permitted to him). Nothing was too white, too saintly, or too misty, for his conception of abstract woman. But the practical wants ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... would fly? I cannot, not yet. One more glimpse of her face, if only to satisfy myself that I have reason for this madness. Perhaps I was but startled yesterday to find a celestial loveliness where I expected to encounter pallid inanity. If my emotion is due to my own weakness rather than to her superiority, I had better recognize my folly before it proves ...
— The Circular Study • Anna Katharine Green
... may, perhaps, serve a purpose on the hearthstone of our inmost life if it be to rescue us from complacency and secure inanity, but in the form of electrically connected lyddite stores and gasoline bombs it drives those who believe in a supernation to a literal interpretation of the above widely popular philosophy. And, as demonstrated at Louvain and Rheims, it goes far to obliterate ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... this same village of St. Germain, see it too, as Fassmann did? And Louis XIV., he is at Versailles; drooping fast, very dull to his Maintenon. And our little Fritz in Berlin is a child in arms;—and the world is all awake as usual, while Fassmann strolls through this noisy inanity of ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... say something wonderful to her; his speech should be like the music and glory and lire that was in him; therefore he was shocked to hear himself remarking, with an inanity of utterance that ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington |
