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Vacuous   Listen
adjective
Vacuous  adj.  Empty; unfilled; void; vacant. "Boundless the deep, because I am who fill Infinitude; nor vacuous the space." "That the few may lead selfish and vacuous days."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Vacuous" Quotes from Famous Books



... replied Godfrey in a somewhat vacuous fashion. "It was all the same to me if we were hunting for young jackdaws or the man in the moon, as long as we ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard

... he had cautiously studied that same sea of always anxious faces! He well knew all the types from the disdainful woman of fashion, the crafty daughter of sin, the vacuous country visitor, down to the argus-eyed mere de famille, sternly resolute in her set purpose of making three dollars take the place of ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage

... door the vacuous look slipped from his face like a mask. The loose-lipped, lost-dog expression was gone. He looked once more alert, competent, fit for the emergency. It had been his cue to let his adversary underestimate him. ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine

... many pictures, few of which are good enough. It belongs to the school of Giovanni Bellini and is conspicuous for the elimination of character. Vacuous bland countenances, indicative merely of pious mildness, surround you, reaching perhaps their highest point of meek ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas

... facing Mr. Braddock Washington in the full sunlight. The elder man was about forty, with a proud, vacuous face, intelligent eyes, and a robust figure. In the mornings he smelt of horses—the best horses. He carried a plain walking-stick of gray birch with a single large opal for a grip. He and Percy ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... best mood for sight-seeing, and Paris was not sitting up for company; in fact, she was "not at home." Remembering all this, I must say that the whole appearance of the city was dull and dreary. London out of season seemed still full of life; Paris out of season looked vacuous and torpid. The recollection of the sorrow, the humiliation, the shame, and the agony she had passed through since I left her picking her way on the arm of the Citizen King, with his old riflard over her, rose before me sadly, ominously, ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes

... there was of Lulu's visit. Father couldn't help remembering her suggestion that they ought to bag a social or artistic lion as an attraction for "The T Room." He was delighted to find that, after weeks of vacuous ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis

... if rather vacuous, young man with a long, elegant body. His dark, sleek hair was always carefully brushed and his small mustache trimmed and curled. His beautiful clothes suggested the fashionable tailors of Savile Row. Everything about him—his tie, his handkerchief protruding ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett

... most part solitary airings and outings involved in my slow convalescence from the extremity of fever, I approached that straitened and somewhat bedarkened issue of the Rue de l'Ecu (was it?) toward the bright-coloured, strongly-peopled Port just where Merridew's English Library, solace of my vacuous hours and temple, in its degree too, of deep initiations, mounted guard at the right. Here, frankly, discrimination drops—every particular in the impression once so quick and fresh sits interlinked with every other in the large lap of the whole. The motley, sunny, breezy, ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James

... one-thousandth of an inch in depth, and many of them probably ten to one hundred times as shallow. Edison finally decided to apply a preliminary metallic coating of infinitesimal thinness, and accomplished this object by a remarkable process known as the vacuous deposit. With this he applied to the original record a film of gold probably no thicker than one three-hundred-thousandth of an inch, or several hundred times less than the depth of an average wave. Three hundred such layers placed one on top of ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin

... minds of men. He looked for its spread over the whole of Christendom, and throughout the winter he spent at Riverdale he was ready to meet all listeners more than half-way with his convictions of its powerful grasp of the average human desire to get something for nothing. The vacuous vulgarity of its texts was a perpetual joy to him, while he bowed with serious respect to the sagacity which built so securely upon the everlasting rock of human ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... man's peculiar abilities for finding out things. Joe Arnold had an innocent, incurious, almost stupid countenance that suggested a chronic desire for sleep rather than any more alert characteristic. He had a dull, uninterested way of asking questions which suggested the impulse of a vacuous mind to "keep the talk going," rather than any desire to secure the information asked for. Indeed, when he asked a question and it was not promptly answered, he always ...
— A Captain in the Ranks - A Romance of Affairs • George Cary Eggleston

... got anything against you." She addressed it as if there were an intelligence back of the vacuous pleasantness of the young face. "It's only that there's not any you and hasn't been for I don't know how long. It's so much deader than death, all ashes to ashes and dust to dust and the spirit turned into something different." ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith

... might have guessed. I wonder it never occurred to me," Mrs. Linceford was replying presently, to her vacuous inquiry. "The name seemed familiar, too; only he called himself 'Dakie.' I remember perfectly now. Old Jacob Thayne, the Chicago millionaire. He married pretty little Mrs. Ingleside, the Illinois Representative's widow, that first ...
— A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life. • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney

... of finding it out. He accordingly set off at his best pace, and pushed Ladoc so hard, that he arrived at the upper fishery in a state of profuse perspiration, with a very red face, and with a disagreeably vacuous feeling about the ...
— Fort Desolation - Red Indians and Fur Traders of Rupert's Land • R.M. Ballantyne

... minutes after eleven. Midnight, then, would just see him in. He rose stiffly and yawned in sheer exhaustion. Then, hesitating, he turned his head and looked back towards the hollow. But a vague foreboding held him back. A sour and vacuous incredulity swept over him. What was the use of all this struggling and vexation. What gain in living on? Once dead his sluggish spirit at least would find its rest. Dust to dust it would indeed be ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare

... gold brocade-covered piano arrested Wilhelm's attention. First of all, Pilar in two different positions, then the pictures of three children, a girl and two boys, and finally the full-length portrait of a gentleman in the embroidered dress coat and sword of the diplomatic service, and the handsome, vacuous, carefully groomed head of ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau

... the foolish, vacuous laugh of a man whose thoughts are too happy for the banality ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew

... /n./ [contraction of 'stub subroutine'] Tiny, often vacuous placeholder for a subroutine that is to be ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0

... evening with Mrs. Fargus, until the cropped hair, the spectacles, above all, the black satin dress with the crimson scarf, getting more and more twisted, became intolerable. And Mr. Fargus' cough and his vacuous conversation, in which no shadow of an idea ever appeared, tried her temper. But she forebore, seeing how anxious they were to please her. That was the worst. These simple kind-hearted people saw that their sitting-room bored Mildred, and they often took her ...
— Celibates • George Moore

... realised that it was faintly moonlight, and that he was gone. So it was possible to be gone. A terrible sense of fatality robbed her of all feeling and thought. She knew he was gone out of the world, there was merely the same world, and absence, his absence. The night seemed large and vacuous. Lanterns swayed here and there, people were talking in an undertone on the launch and in the boats. She could hear Winifred moaning: 'OH DO FIND HER GERALD, DO FIND HER,' and someone trying to comfort the child. Gudrun ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence

... northern Gothic manner has been wholly misconceived. On the other hand, the interior is noble. The feeling for space possessed by the architect has expressed itself in proportions large and solemn; the area enclosed, though somewhat cold and vacuous to northern taste, is at least impressive by its severe harmony. But the real attractions of the church are isolated details. Wherever the individual artist-mind has had occasion to emerge, there our gaze is riveted, our criticism challenged, our admiration won. The frescoes of Signorelli, ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds

... an insistence upon technical perfection as in itself a supreme good. Neither the art of religion nor the religion of art is an adequate statement of the possibilities and purpose of art, but there is no doubt that the religion of art is by far the more vacuous of the two. The values of literature, the standards by which it must be criticised, and the scheme according to which it must be arranged, are in the last resort moral. The sense that they should be ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry

... one more very shameful, distressing, and final role in the free life of Liubka. She had already complained to Lichonin for a long time that the presence of Simanovsky was oppressive to her; but Lichonin paid no attention to womanish trifles: the vacuous, fictitious, wordy hypnosis of this man of commands was strong within him. There are influences, to get rid of which is difficult, almost impossible. On the other hand, he was already for a long time feeling the burden of co-habitation with Liubka. Frequently he ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin

... everything Siddhartha did and said and what he loved most was his spirit, his transcendent, fiery thoughts, his ardent will, his high calling. Govinda knew: he would not become a common Brahman, not a lazy official in charge of offerings; not a greedy merchant with magic spells; not a vain, vacuous speaker; not a mean, deceitful priest; and also not a decent, stupid sheep in the herd of the many. No, and he, Govinda, as well did not want to become one of those, not one of those tens of thousands of Brahmans. He wanted to follow Siddhartha, the beloved, the splendid. And ...
— Siddhartha • Herman Hesse

... that ridiculous twaddle. It was trying to flirt with a silly school-girl. What will do for fifteen is somewhat vacuous for—” ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson

... innocent of any intention of sarcasm. But her mind, like those of so many unoccupied, and consequently self-occupied persons, was addicted to speculation of a minor and vacuous sort. She was also liable —as such persons often are—to mistake cavilling for spirit and ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet

... creature contented enough. And why not—with a sufficient income, a comfortable home, and fair health? At the end of a day devoted partly to sheer vacuous idleness and partly to the monotonous simple machinery of physical existence—everlasting cookery, everlasting cleanliness, everlasting stitchery—her mother did not with a yearning sigh demand, "Must ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett

... consistent with one another as taking pains with his mind could make them, distinguished Mr. Mill from the men who flit aimlessly from doctrine to doctrine, as the flies of a summer day dart from point to point in the vacuous air. It distinguished him also from those sensitive spirits who fling themselves down from the heights of rationalism suddenly into the pit of an infallible church; and from those who, like La Mennais, move violently ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 3 (of 3) - Essay 2: The Death of Mr Mill - Essay 3: Mr Mill's Autobiography • John Morley

... of poker is played in calm; happy is he who can preserve a perfectly expressionless face through all its vicissitudes. But the game of whiskey-poker (which is no game) is played amid vacuous excitement and strong language and derisive laughter—especially towards four in the morning. The whole of this little party seemed ready to go; in fact, they had all risen and were standing round the table; but nevertheless ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black

... hearer, looked slightly distressed, as if he was suppressing some emotion. He was rather a vacuous-looking young man—startlingly clean as to countenance and linen. He was shaven, and had he not been distinctly a gentleman, he might have been a groom. He apparently had a habit of thrusting forward his chin for the purpose of scratching it pensively with his ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman

... vacuum. Experiment alone could answer this question, but there were difficulties in the way of this which seemed almost insurmountable. The rays are stopped by glass even of slight thickness, and how then could the almost vacuous space in which they have to come into existence be separated from the space, absolutely vacuous or filled with gas, into which it ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare

... bottle with a cap and scarf of gold foil stood sentinel over two glasses of such an exquisite shape that Marcella stared hard at them as she passed, saying "Good night." Mr. Peters was smiling with filmy, vacuous eyes. The little lady was flushed and vivid-looking. They both nodded beamingly at her. At the other side of the steps, in the bright light of the electric lamp was a small bundle, between two scarlet fire buckets. ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles

... wall smiling complacently while other people were up and doing. I've always felt I wouldn't mind being a chaperon if they'd let me set up some sort of a workshop in the ballroom, or even if I could take my mending, or a book to read. But slow, long hours of vacuous smiling certainly would wear me out. However, I don't imagine that Mary will call upon me for ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie

... Las Vegas marched in. Between them was their prisoner, a boy with a vacuous face, clad in a straitjacket that seemed to make no difference at all to him. His mind was—somewhere else. But his body was trapped between the FBI agents: the body of ...
— Brain Twister • Gordon Randall Garrett

... all the vices of his worthless race, and none of the energy of its founder. He is by far the most contemptible of the figures in this passage. Note his notion of, and his feeling to, Jesus. He thought of our Lord as of a magician or juggler, who might do some wonders to amuse the vacuous ennui of his sated nature. Time was when he had felt some twinge of conscience in listening to the Baptist, and had almost been lifted to nobleness by that strong arm. Time was, too, when he had trembled at hearing of Jesus, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... their beauty was regnant in London. They were not politicians as were their Graces of Gordon and Devonshire, nor had they the ability to become such. Neither were they the associates of brilliant, intellectual men, but participants in the gay, vacuous, showy society of the rapid set of the aristocracy. The elder sister gained the coronet of Coventry, but her vanity caused her own undoing; the younger was a part of the exhibition of "Beauty and the Beast." A high price was paid for her position by the ...
— Some Old Time Beauties - After Portraits by the English Masters, with Embellishment and Comment • Thomson Willing

... wit and her love of art. What would she be, for instance, if she were not a musician? Or would her face be the same face if it were robbed of its mirth? But mirth is enchanting only when the source of it is the intelligence. Vacuous laughter is the most tiresome of things; a face of stone is more inveigling. But Doris prided herself on her beauty more than on her wit, and she was disinclined to admit the contention that beauty is dependent ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore

... help, help!" No answer. Even the echoes flung back only dull, vacuous sounds that deepened her sense of ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England

... out of it for good and all. So did we think. We were as smug as you are when France went down in '71.... Yours is only one further degree of insularity. You think this vacuous aloofness of yours is some sort of moral superiority. So did we, ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells

... Bartlett. I can well believe it. The empty shibboleths—the loud and blatant voice—the bumptious temper—that make the commoner form of Tory—all are there. He is the dramatically complete embodiment of all the vacuous folly, empty-headed shoutings, and swaggering patriotism which make up the stock-in-trade of most provincial Tories. Poor Mr. Balfour was caught by Sir Ashmead before he had time to escape, and in sheer decency had to remain while his servile adulator was pouring ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor

... a favourite term with Chuang Tzu for the exercise of his wit. Light asked Nothing, saying: "Do you, sir, exist, or do you not exist?" But getting no answer to his question, Light set to work to watch for the appearance of Nothing. Hidden, vacuous—all day long he looked but could not see it, listened but could not hear it, grasped at but could not seize it. "Bravo!" cried Light; "who can equal this? I can get to be nothing [meaning darkness], but I can't get ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles

... Henrietta returning from the saloon. I had thought of nothing but to get as far away as possible from the horror of it all. Dashing headlong down the street, I was going I knew not where, when suddenly Henrietta's vacuous "tee-hee" rang out in the darkness and echoed among the iron girders of the elevated trestle; and, looking ahead of me, I saw her in the light of the corner gas-jet coming toward me, a man on either side of her, and all three evidently ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson

... carried the slack form inside. Then, his shoulders sagging, the heavy pistol in his right hand coming to a poise, the fingers of the left hand brushing the butt of the weapon in the holster at his left hip, the vacuous gleam in his eyes telling them all that his senses were alert to catch the slightest movement, ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer

... in the hot air. Then the coach began to move and at the same time the giant trees stirred in a peculiar way. They, like a vast army, bent low with a sound as of heavy artillery rumbling over a bridge that covered vacuous depths. Then they began a deafening noise, their branches sweeping ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne

... common thing to hear persons say, when you ask them if they are using a condensing engine, "I can not use it; I have not water enough." A very sufficient answer indeed, if an injection condenser or an ordinary surface condenser constituted the sole means by which a vacuous condition might be obtained; but a very insufficient answer, having regard to the existence of the evaporative condenser, as by its means, whenever there is water enough for the feed of a non condensing ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 312, December 24, 1881 • Various

... almost see them evaporating. Yes, the time will come when some one of our mutual friends, driving past the Meadow Creek Paresis Club, where Dr. McMullen receives certain amiable but not entirely responsible persons, will behold you hanging cheerily by one hand from the pergola roof with a vacuous smile on your twitching lips, and will say to me sadly: 'Charlie, you knew him, didn't you, in the old days, when his mind was as keen and bright as an editor's knife?' And with chastened melancholy I will respond: 'Yes, ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble

... over the cliffs supports the adventurous bird-nester in safety above the murmuring sea. They who clasp Christ's hand outstretched from above, may swing over the deepest, most vacuous abyss, and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren

... with a most sand-the-sugar face, this morning, as he pocketed about ten times the value of a trifle—candles, in fact, which have risen twenty-five per cent. in the last two days—and folding his arms, scowled from under his kepi into futurity, with stern but vacuous resolution. ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere

... little Alisa Bennett assumed maternal responsibilities at the age of ten, and gained her sobriquet of 'Marm Lisa.' She grew more human, more tractable, under Mr. Grubb's fostering care; but that blessed martyr had now been dead two years, and she began to wear her former vacuous look, and to slip back into the past that was still more dreadful than ...
— Marm Lisa • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... in a remote part of the salon. With her was a vacuous looking young man who seldom spoke to her but was continually addressing remarks to a woman ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy

... was startled by an audible titter from Patty, who hastily composed her face and assumed a look of vacuous innocence—but too late. She had caught the instructor's eye ...
— When Patty Went to College • Jean Webster

... detected in modern youth of both sexes. I did not pursue the question, but alluded to autumn gaieties. She spoke of them without enthusiasm. Miss Somebody's wedding was very dull, and Mrs. Somebody Else's dance manned with vile and vacuous dancers. At the Opera the greatest of German sopranos sang false. All human institutions had taken a crooked turn, and her cat could not be persuaded to pay the commonest attention to its kittens. Then ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke

... Nick at last—"there's the naked, preposterous truth: that if I were to do exactly as I liked I should spend my years reproducing the more or less vacuous countenances of my fellow-mortals. I should find peace and pleasure and wisdom and worth, I should find fascination and a measure of success in it—out of the din and the dust and the scramble, the world of party labels, party cries, party bargains and party ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James

... brain collects around it in time many others, whose mental processes are a feeble imitation of its own. Thus it came to pass that, as the years rolled on, Harston learned to lean more and more upon his old school-fellow, grafting many of his stern peculiarities upon his own simple vacuous nature, until he became a strange parody of the original. To him Girdlestone was the ideal man, Girdlestone's ways the correct ways, and Girdlestone's opinions the weightiest of all opinions. Forty years of this undeviating fidelity must, ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle

... Manrico are about to be married; everything prepared—four apathetic bridesmaids, and the four acolytes in tights—who have possibly been kindly lent by the Convent for the occasion—in a vacuous row at the back of the scene. Fancy Manrico has forgotten to give them the usual initial brooches, and they feel the wedding is a poky affair, and take no interest in it. Leonora herself is in low spirits—seems to miss the confidant, and to be oppressed with a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 29, 1892 • Various

... who, after extensive foreign travel, spent his life at Breslau as an exemplary and highly esteemed official of the town. Incidentally he poetized in the inflated and ornate style which has given the so-called second Silesian school its evil reputation. His work is decidedly vacuous as poetry, but has its interest as indicating the literary drift of the age of puffs, powder, and pedantry. The selections follow Bobertag's edition in ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas

... in listless progress. The light, reflected from the screen, revealed a throng of repulsive faces, stretching, row upon row, into the darkness of the rear, into the shadows of the roof—sickly and pimpled and bloated flesh: vicious faces, hopeless, vacuous, diseased. And these were the faces that leered and writhed in the boy's dreams of hell. Here, present and tangible, were gathered all his terrors. He was in ...
— The Mother • Norman Duncan

... time of his father's death, William B. Astor, the chief heir of John Jacob Astor's twenty million dollars, was fifty-six years old. A tall, ponderous man, his eyes were small, contracted, with a rather vacuous look, and his face was sluggish and unimpressionable. Extremely unsocial and taciturn, he never betrayed emotion and generally was destitute of feeling. He took delight in affecting a carelessly-dressed, slouchy appearance as though deliberately ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus

... his face, as she scrutinized it, a stormy glow of the man's native, coarse, imperious virility, reasserting itself through the mask of torpor which this vacuous year had superimposed. The large features were somehow grown larger still; they dominated the countenance as rough bold headlands dominate a shore. It was the visage of a conqueror—of a man gathering within himself, to expend upon his fellows, ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic

... lady is not at the head of her house it is certainly vacuous," Ideala agreed, "like the lives of our own ladies when they are not forced to do anything. Why, at Scarborough this year they had to take to changing their dresses four times a day; so you can imagine how they ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand

... Malvey stooped, Boca flung herself in front of him. "Pig!" she flamed. She turned furiously on her father, whose vacuous grin faded as she cursed him shrilly for ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs

... the grove. He is a fair, fresh-colored Englishman of twenty-five, handsome in a rather vacuous way. He wears white duck riding-breeches, light-tan leather riding-gaiters and shoes, a riding-coat of white duck, a waistcoat light tan in shade, and a high riding-stock, the collar of which is white, the "puffed" tie pink; a Panama hat with a fold of light ...
— The Man from Home • Booth Tarkington and Harry Leon Wilson

... over such waters any boat must needs go easily. It was in the blackness of night, amidst the fury of the storm, that Montesma's opinion had been formed. Smithson began to think that his friend was right. The sailors had honest countenances, but they looked horribly stupid. Could men with such vacuous grins, such an air of imbecile good-nature, be capable of acting wisely in any terrible crisis?—could they have nerve and readiness, quickness, decision, all those grand qualites which are needed by the seaman who has to contend with the fury of ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon

... that's the Blackbird's note, the sweet Night's knell. Behold, Beloved, the penance you would brave!' 'Curs'd when it comes, the bitter thing we crave! Thou leav'st me now, like to the moon at dawn, A little, vacuous world alone in air. I will not care! When dark comes back my dark shall be withdrawn! Go free; For 'tis with me As when the cup the Child scoops in the sand Fills, and is part and parcel of the Sea. I'll say it to myself and understand. Farewell! Go as thou wilt and come! Lover divine, Thou still ...
— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore

... into a group dominated for the moment by an angular woman who was saying loud and penetrating things about the suffrage, Mrs. Pett had seized and removed a tall, blonde young man with a mild, vacuous face. For the past few minutes this young man had been sitting bolt upright on a chair with his hands on his knees, so exactly in the manner of an end-man at a minstrel show that one would hardly have been surprised had he burst into song or asked ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse

... creature among close-clipped barn door fowl. How tired the poor girl was of the dull life about her,—the old woman's "skeleton hand" at the window opposite, drawing her curtains,—"Ma'am shooing away the hens,"—the vacuous country eyes staring at her as only country eyes can stare,—a routine of mechanical duties, and the soul's half-articulated cry for sympathy, without an answer! Yes,—pray for her, and for all such! Faith often cures ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)

... which is sentiment overdone She always laughs and cries in the right places Some people that think everything pitiable is so funny Takes very little to spoil everything for writer, talker, lover There is nothing I do not question Two sides to everybody, as there are to that piece of money Vacuous countenances Virtues of her deceased spouse We never need fear that he will undervalue himself What have I to do with time, but to fill it up with labor? What you hate in him is chiefly misfortune Wholesale thinker who handles knowledge by the cargo ...
— Widger's Quotations from the Works of Oliver W. Holmes, Sr. • David Widger

... for his hat. On a table behind him a monthly magazine lay open, exhibiting one of those melancholy modern "illustrations" which present the English art of our day in its laziest and lowest state of degradation. A vacuous young giant, in flowing trousers, stood in a garden, and stared at a plump young giantess with enormous eyes and rotund hips, vacantly boring holes in the grass with the point of her parasol. Perfectly incapable of explaining itself, this imbecile ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins

... But its first title In 1731 was "Of Taste"; and this was subsequently altered to "Of False Taste." It was addressed to Pope's friend, Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington; and, under the style of "Timon's Villa," employed, for its chief illustration of wasteful and vacuous magnificence, the ostentatious seat which James Brydges, first Duke of Chandos, had erected at Canons, near Edgware. The story of Pope's epistle does not belong to this place. But in the print of The Man of Taste, William Hogarth, ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson

... about four of them before abandoning her mule for the detour on foot. But when she had left the town only a little way two horsemen came up behind her. She knew neither of them, and they were immature boys, with the empty and vacuous faces of almost degenerate illiteracy. They seemed unarmed but since it was vital to Alexander's scheme to ride unwatched it became important to have them either go ahead or to distance them. Accordingly she urged her mule into a lumbering ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck

... whom civic virtues of a high order were not likely to develop. If he betook himself to the town his possible usefulness lessened in proportion as he fell into drunken or dissolute habits, or lapsed into a state of lazy and vacuous dreaminess, enlivened only by chatter or the rolling of a cigarette. On the other hand, when employed in a capacity where native talent might be tested, he often revealed a power of action which, if properly guided, could be turned to excellent account. As a ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd

... playing looked up. He was about fifty years of age, clean shaven, with vacuous eyes and a weak mouth. He was ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... Vacant neokupata. Vacate forlasi. Vacation libertempo. Vaccinate inokuli. Vacillate sxanceligxi. Vacillating sxanceligxa. Vacuous malplena. Vacuum malplenajxo. Vagabond sentauxgulo, vagisto. Vagary kaprico. Vagrant vagisto. Vague malpreciza. Vain (fruitless) vana. Vain (conceited) vanta. Vain, in vane. Vainly vane. Vale valeto. Valet lakeo, servisto. Valiant brava. Valid legxa. Valise valizo. Valley ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes

... wine—for in these respects I am allowed what I choose—and sat down to think. But I found it hard to give my thoughts to anything. There was a hollow somewhere in my mind into which all serious thoughts fell jumbled. I felt neither pained nor confused, but only vacuous. I battled with this feeling until I subdued it. Then I grasped the situation firmly. What object have I, here and now, and everywhere and always, next to the rectitude of my own soul? There is only one answer to that question: Cecilia's ...
— The Romance Of Giovanni Calvotti - From Coals Of Fire And Other Stories, Volume II. (of III.) • David Christie Murray

... expression, no "hot amortist." Of his views on polygamy, to which he had distinct leanings, we shall speak later. He said he required two, and only two qualities in a woman, namely beauty and affection. It was the Eastern idea. The Hindu Angelina might be vacuous, vain, papilionaceous, silly, or even a mere doll, but if her hair hung down "like the tail of a Tartary cow," [96] if her eyes were "like the stones of unripe mangoes," and her nose resembled the beak of a parrot, the Hindu Edwin was more than satisfied. ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright

... opened her eyes, there was no light of reason in them—only the vacuous, unseeing stare of a dulled ...
— Square Deal Sanderson • Charles Alden Seltzer

... over, as Mr. Rives called it, "a mimic commonwealth, with its foreign and domestic relations, and its regular administrative hierarchy." He did not comprehend that the isolated life of a slave plantation was ordinarily only a kind of perpetual barbecue, with its rough sports and vacuous leisure, where the roasted ox was largely wasted and not always pleasant to look at. There was a rude hospitality, where food, provided by unpaid labor, was cheap and abundant, and where the host was always ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay

... mildly gay. Illness had dimmed his eyes, formerly brightened by the pleasures of good living and devoid of serious ideas, with a veil which simulated thought. It was but the skeleton of the old Birotteau who had rolled only one year earlier so vacuous but so content along the Cloister. The bishop cast one look of pity and contempt upon his victim; then he consented to forget him, ...
— The Vicar of Tours • Honore de Balzac

... afternoon tea is not to be taken seriously, and I hold that any kind of conversation goes, as long as it is properly vacuous ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IX (of X) • Various

... stole lead! And they got off with all your money. Gosh! I'm glad I didn't have none along." His eyes were mirthless and his face vacuous. "Beats all. Never heard tell ...
— Scattergood Baines • Clarence Budington Kelland

... Paul," said the pretty nurse. The hulking mass of not-quite-human gazed at her with vacuous eyes and opened its mouth. Dexterously, she spooned a mouthful of baby food into it. "Now swallow it, ...
— Suite Mentale • Gordon Randall Garrett

... is "passionately fond of music." Which means? That the readers of this stuff consider a passionate love of music to be fashionable. It is so easy, you see, to possess it. There is no need to study either musical theory, practice, history, or biography. An inane expression of vacuous content when music is being rendered, a quantity of rhapsodical rubbish about Chopin and Beethoven without any knowledge of either, and behold! a ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee

... On this good ship naught but uncertain age Measures those forms divine to which we kneel. (Seldonskip walks slowly on.) Quezox speaking to Francos. Most noble sire, in wonderment I pause. If I may query put, what mental rheum Did cause selection of such vacuous mind To fill a post requiring mental grasp? Francos: Good Quezox, surely I was misinformed. Full well; his sire, I dreamed, was made of clay Much finer than is wont within the mold, And so I eager seized his proffered aid. But keen regret doth fill my troubled soul And fears prophetic, ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)

... was that way. She was in the seat beside him. Every dear, every sweet, every luscious, lovely memory of her was there ... and behind him, just out of eye-corner visibility, were the three kids. And a whole lifetime of this loomed ahead—a vista of emptiness more vacuous far than the emptiest reaches of intergalactic space. Damnation! He couldn't stand ...
— The Vortex Blaster • Edward Elmer Smith

... actor who played Captain Grey, played so slowly that Hubert could hardly refrain from calling from his box. He looked round the theatre, noticing the indifferent faces of the critics, and the women's shoulders seemed to him especially vacuous and imbecile. ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore

... couldn't say," said Audits shortly. "Maybe because he's the only man I know, good or bad, who has an imagination and the courage of his convictions. Maybe it's to get away from the young fools that spend their vacuous hours pursuing me around the country. But as for the famous Russian bracelet, you can set your mind at rest on that score. He's going to give it to me at Palm Beach—if you'll show a ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... sheep ran—but they ran to a common center. As the shooting went on they bunched tighter and tighter, until it seemed as though those in the center must surely be crushed flat. From an ambling, feeding company of animals, they become a lumpy gray blanket, with here and there a long, vacuous face ...
— Flying U Ranch • B. M. Bower

... touch had discharged all power from the man he had seized, the fierce look faded from his face, which grew heavy, vacuous, and dull; his legs trembled beneath him, and he lurched forward, and was only saved from falling by a rapid movement on Stratton's part as he swung him into an easy-chair, where his enemy sank back with his head lying over on one shoulder, ...
— Witness to the Deed • George Manville Fenn

... rude violence. The poem is an idyll quite as much as a satire. The follies of fashionable life are treated with nothing severer than light raillery; and its actually distasteful features,—its lapses into stupidity, its vacuous restlessness, its ennui,—are cunningly suppressed. But all that made it seem the height of human felicity is preserved, and enhanced in charm. "Launched on the bosom of the silver Thames," one glides to Hampton Court amid youth and gayety and melting music; and ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum

... doubt she saw Erik only casually, at an Eastern Star dance, at the shop, where, in the presence of Nat Hicks, they conferred with immense particularity on the significance of having one or two buttons on the cuff of Kennicott's New Suit. For the benefit of beholders they were respectably vacuous. ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis

... marble steps along the Grand Canal. Empty! that, too, was empty from side to side between cool palace facades, the length of its expressive curve. From silence and emptiness into silence the gondola pushed. Someone to incarnate this empty, vacuous world! Memory troubled itself with a face, and eyes, and hair, and a voice that mocked the little goings up and down ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick

... pheasant as if the noise had pierced his heart, and remained stiller than the crawling roots around him, and not half so easy to see. But it was no good. Up shot the dozen heads above the herbage, and two dozen vacuous eyes regarded his vicinity ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars

... muttered-"'Spiritual'?" A faint dull vacuous smile flickered over his face, and he shuddered. "I understand! You come to prepare ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli

... very well." I stopped and blushed. Did I really know Sarah Walker very well? And would Sarah Walker know me now? Or would it not be very like her to go back on me? There was certainly anything but promise in the feeble-minded, vacuous copy of Sarah before me. I was yet hesitating, when the Prince, who had possibly received some quieting assurance from the portier, himself stepped forward, stammered that the Princess would, without doubt, be charmed ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte

... eyes, to be sure—two of them—and they were brown, with a touch of beryl in the brown, and, conceivably, they had a soul behind them, of one sort or another, but she had as much personality as a jelly-fish. She was neither pleased nor affronted by the vacuous ass's compliments, and when he praised her hair and her complexion, she accepted it as placidly as if she had been a waxen lady in a ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray

... at once broke up the ring, the carpenter dropping his bird incontinently and fleeing into the forecastle with the other men; but, the Chinaman never moved a muscle of his countenance when he turned his round innocent-looking, vacuous, Mongolian face and caught sight of "Old Jock's" ...
— Afloat at Last - A Sailor Boy's Log of his Life at Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson

... frequently observed," he spoke, in absent wise, "that all young women having that peculiarly vacuous expression about the eyes—I believe there are misguided persons who describe such eyes as being 'dreamy,'—are invariably possessed of a fickle, unstable and coquettish temperament. Oh, no! You may depend upon ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell

... your inbreathing, gaping desire that drew this red gush in me; I must be reciprocating your vacuous, hideous passion. ...
— Look! We Have Come Through! • D. H. Lawrence

... blow he had dealt them. Anon there would be railings and to spare—against him, against themselves, against the dead man above stairs, against Fate, and more besides. For the present there was this horrid, almost vacuous calm. ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini

... asked Barto whether he would try that chance. The answer was a vacuous shake of the head, accompanied by an expression of unutterable mournfulness. 'There's no other way,' pursued Battista, 'unless you jump into the Adige, and swim down half-a-mile under water; and cats hate ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... held us up, and when MacRae had convinced him that our business was urgent, and not for his ears, he graciously allowed us to enter the Presence—who proved to be a heavy-set person with sandy, mutton-chop whiskers set bias on a vacuous, round, florid countenance. His braid-trimmed uniform was cut to fit him like the skin of an exceedingly well-stuffed sausage, and from his comfortable seat behind a flat-topped desk he gazed upon us with the wisdom of a tree-full of owls and the dignity ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... acceptable to Conrad Lagrange and Aaron King—the two representatives of the world to which she aspired—could not let the opportunity slip. She fairly deluged them with the spray of her admiring ejaculations in praise of the musician—employing, hit or miss, every musical term that popped into her vacuous head. ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright

... his armhole, he placed his hand on the work-table, he abandoned his attitude, he smiled! The smile was so vacuous that it misled the Baroness; she took it for an ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac

... might he not do? Was it possible that it was this man who stood before us now with his eyes fastened upon us so intently and his lips spread in that little, empty smile? Suddenly I knew! Those eyes! Those eyes were the shiny, vacuous, soulless eyes of ...
— The Floating Island of Madness • Jason Kirby

... Faraday, Clerk-Maxwell, Hertz, Lodge and Lenard. The human optic nerve is affected by a very small range in the waves that exist in the ether. Beyond the visible spectrum of common light are vibrations which have long been known as heat or as photographically active. Crookes in a vacuous bulb produced soft light from high tension electricity. Lenard found that rays from a Crookes' tube passed through substances opaque to common light. Roentgen extended these experiments and used the rays photographically, taking pictures of the bones of the hand through living ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various

... especially remarked at the time came to him in the midst of his work at the bank. Sometimes when he turned off the gas at night, or just as he was falling asleep, the sharp, attenuated figure of the ship-builder limned itself against the blackness of the chamber, or the old gentleman's vacuous countenance in its frame of silver hair peered in through the hangings of the bed. But more frequently it was the young girl's face that haunted Lynde. He saw her as she came up the sunny road, swinging the flower in ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... still, Cloud-like we lean and stare as bright leaves stare, And gradually along the stranger hill Our unwalled loves thin out on vacuous air, ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke

... fifty or sixty of Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown's more intimate friends had gathered. The whole meeting was composed of ladies, except for the presence of one or two men who represented special cases. There was, of course, little Mr. Spillikins, with his vacuous face and football hair, who was there, as everybody knew, on account of Dulphemia; and there was old Judge Longerstill, who sat leaning on a gold-headed stick with his head sideways, trying to hear some fraction of what was being said. He came to the gathering ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock

... individuals who had wounded his self-esteem; and, since whatever opposed him was necessarily an embodiment of the power of evil, the contest rose into one of Ormuzd against Ahriman. His intellect, the lesser faculty, was absorbed by his imagination. Vacuous generalities, clothed in magnificent rhetoric, could pass with him for ideas; but his visions are sometimes thoughts in images. The voice of his passions was leonine, but his moral sensibility wanted delicacy. His laughter ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden

... imparting information, as though it were an incident of a five-o'clock tea, but Lydia felt a pang of remorse for her usual thoughtless attitude of exasperated hilarity over Miss Burgess' peculiarities. She noticed that the kind, vacuous face was beginning to look more than middle-aged, and that the scanty hair above ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield

... a moment, but instantly avoided the other's glance, his features being still distorted by a vacuous smile. ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef

... forehead was knitted with vacuous perplexity; his eyes reflected blanks of unreason; his whole body had an effect of weak settling and subsidence. The man who worked next to him in the cutting-room at Lloyd's, and had searched at his side indefatigably from the first, stole a tender hand under his shoulder. "Come ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... opinions were not strictly Christian; and she sometimes wept as she reflected that if her husband should die it would be in a state of final impenitence, so that she could not hope to snatch him from the eternal fires of Hell. Thus Granville was a mark for the mean ideas, the vacuous arguments, the narrow views by which his wife—fancying she had achieved the first victory—tried to gain a second by bringing him back within the pale of ...
— A Second Home • Honore de Balzac

... to this," drawled Average Jones intently, looking the employee between his vacuous eyes. "Ransom shipped the chair to Plymouth Street and from there to Linder's house. He figured out that Linder would put it in his study and do his sitting at the window in it. And you were to know when he was there by seeing his feet in the window, ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... settled down again. The cellarers redoubled their activities, the flagons circulated more briskly, and the noise they made must have disturbed the monks entrenched in their cells against these earthly vanities. The laughter of Andreas grew louder and more vacuous, and when at last he heaved himself up at midnight and departed to bed, that he might take some rest against the morrow's hunt, he staggered ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini

... and sat looking in front of him with an air of vacuous sullenness which ill-became his cast of countenance. I bade the cabman pass though Lowndes Square. As we passed the Apostle's I pulled him up. I pointed ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh

... life in Barbados had made an almost tragic mark upon the young seaman. His erstwhile bright alertness was all departed. His face was growing vacuous, his eyes were dull and lack-lustre, and he moved in a cringing, furtive manner, like an over-beaten dog. He had survived the ill-nourishment, the excessive work on the sugar plantation under a pitiless sun, the lashes ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini

... us who are neither hungry nor vacuous, there is not, generally speaking, much attempt to make the best of our spiritual privileges. We teach our children, as we were taught ourselves, to give importance only to the fact of exclusiveness, expense, rareness, ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee

... the insinuation of Fanny Tarnow (1835), that the poet prized in Bettina only her capacity for idolizing him. But Goethe's attitude toward the "Child" was far removed from that of poet-pasha, and Bettina had nothing of the vacuous odalisque in her composition. G. von Loeper has well said of her composite traits: "The tender radiance of first youth hovers over her descriptions; but, while one is beholding, Bettina suddenly changes into a mischievous elf, and, if we reach out to grasp the kobold, lo! a sibyl ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various

... discontent that occasionally affected her—the discontent of women who have only themselves to think about. One might have said that at these times she was subconsciously wearied of her form of life; that, in so many words, though ignorant of the fact, though, consciously, her vacuous life immensely satisfied her, she was BORED. But to-day, bluntly speaking, it was about her husband that her vague dissatisfaction centered; and when she had glanced coolly at her former suitor, it was ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine

... family would be off again to Dunbude, or away to its other moors in Scotland; and among the rocks and the heather Ernest felt he could endure Lord Exmoor and Lord Lynmouth a little more resignedly than among the reiterated polite platitudes and monotonous gaieties of the vacuous London drawing-rooms. ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen

... Many of the men were muscular and well-grown, but with a lanky, stooping height that did not suggest health. Inflamed eyes were common in that congregation, hollow cheeks flushed with the sign there is no mistaking, faces vacuous and ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly

... being that inhabits the earth? And thus Lodge bottles Haeckel up on his own premises and shows that the very evolutionary principles to which the German scientist appeals demolish his theory! He practically says to Haeckel, "Your philosophy, sir, fails to show how it is possible for the vacuous mind of the infant to evolve into the genius of the philosopher in thirty or forty years." In other words, if the infant is nothing but the form we see it would be utter absurdity to say that that mass of matter can evolve a high grade of intelligence within a ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers

... of the passengers, I should say that faces were prevailingly vacuous, their owners half hypnotized, as it seemed, by the monotonous throb and tremor of the great sea-monster on whose back we were riding. I myself had few thoughts, fancies, emotions. One thing above all struck me as never before,—the ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes

... had had a few words with my hostess, the crowd resolved itself into a dozen persons at most, and seeing Karine at a far end of the room surrounded by three or four vacuous-looking young men, I desperately resolved ...
— The House by the Lock • C. N. Williamson

... were several "smart," so-called "Society" people who emphasised the protest in him to the point of definite contempt. Overdressed, the latest worldly novel under their arms, they strutted the narrow pavements of their tiny world, immensely pleased with themselves. Their vacuous minds expressed themselves in the slang of their exclusive circle—value being the element excluded. The pettiness of their outlook hardly distressed him—he was too familiar with it at home—but their essential ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood

... for a laugh, looking unusually bored and vacuous, he went out of the room like a man in an earthquake sedately strolling away between reeling ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman

... wrote an epistolary style exasperatingly vacuous and diffuse, and, like many women of that sort, she used pencil instead of ink, always apologizing for it as due now to her weak eyes, and now to her weak wrist, and again to her not being able to find the ink. Her hand was full of foolish ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells

... left the old Laird beheld his new daughter-in-law, while further down the pew as far as she could retreat, Mrs. Daney, with face aflame, sat rigid, her bovine countenance upraised and her somewhat vacuous glance fixed unblinkingly at a point some forty feet over Mr. Tingley's pious head. Donald intercepted the old man's amazed and troubled glance, and smiled at his father with his eyes—an affectionate overture that was not lost on The Laird ere he jerked ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne

... Erebus into the day, There's plenty of room overhead; No boring or blasting of rocks in the way, No stratum of sticky, impervious clay— All vacuous vapor instead. ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard

... fond of the huge, silent woman who had followed her without question into the unknown wilderness of the Northland, even as she had accompanied her without protest through the maze of the far South Seas. With all her averseness to speech and her vacuous, fishy stare, the girl had long since learned that Big Lena was both loyal and efficient and shrewd. But, Big Lena as a wife! Chloe smiled broadly ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx

... half-reclined in a great chair on the veranda and watched the dusky blue mist twining itself around the brown hills. She was not thinking of the babies; she was not worrying about home; she was not longing for anything, or even indulging in a dream. That vacuous content which engrosses the body after long indisposition, held her imperatively. Suddenly she was aroused from this happy condition of nothingness by the spectacle of an enormous bull-dog approaching her with threatening teeth. She had noticed the monster ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie

... whether their tutor be a philosopher or a fool. And if a faulty example be a child's most constant and influential teacher, what wonder that the lessons, well-learned, are put in practice? And just then, if you listen, you will hear some one issue the emphatic but vacuous command, "Don't!" And the baby doesn't, for the space of a few seconds; after which, unable to get any new suggestions out of the idea-less instructions given him, he proceeds to do the same thing over, only to be again ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton

... beginning with the tall lean countenance of the Princess Mother, with its small inquisitive eyes perched as high as attic windows under a frizzled thatch of hair and a pediment of uncleaned diamonds; passed on to the vacuous and overfed or fashionably haggard masks of the ladies next in rank; and finally caught, between branching orchids, a distant glimpse ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton

... on the market. Most of us feel that to "be sociable" we must talk incessantly. True, there are sometimes dreadful pauses in conversation when no one seems able to think of anything to say, and the longer the pause the more vacuous one's mind. ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter

... a frump who sells her soul for gewgaws and furbalows! When posterity shall read of how the diseased mind of a single lunatic has stabbed history's richest pages with a sword of murder, rapacity and lust, it will turn a lip of contempt toward every nation that stood upon a vacuous neutrality. To hell with neutrality, when ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris

... valley; the road was full of dust. The vehicles, full of chattering, smoking, vacuous persons were speeding home. The hands of many were full of poor fading flowers, torn from lawn and ledge to please a momentary whim. Yet beside the road slid the clear stream over its shingle, passing from brisk cascades into dark and silent pools, fringed with rich water-plants, the ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson

... not at all interested in that addlepated, monkey-faced nincompoop. He's after my daughter, but he shall never marry her. Why, if wives could be supported for fifty cents a year, that empty-headed specimen of vacuous mentality couldn't even ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page

... more or less quiet. Dull faces here, there,—in how many places! I don't say dull people, but faces without a ray of sympathy or a movement of expression. They are what kill the lecturer. These negative faces with their vacuous eyes and stony lineaments pump and suck the warm soul out of him;—that is the chief reason why lecturers grow so pale before the season is over. They render latent any amount of vital caloric; they act on our minds as those cold-blooded ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various

... him go, his head drooped, and then he turned and looked at me with a silly, vacuous smile. I looked away hurriedly; this was not a man with whom I cared to ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford

... however, because he has always been able to laugh at his disciples as unfeelingly as at anybody else. He has courted unpopularity as other men have courted popularity. He has refused to assume the vacuous countenance either of an idol or a worshipper, and in the result those of us to whom life without reverence seems like life in ruins are filled at times with a wild lust to denounce and belittle him. He has been called more names than ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd

... emotions, to crush altogether the sexual nature would be a barren, if not, indeed, a perilous victory, bringing with it no satisfaction. "If I had only had three weeks' happiness," said a woman, "I would not quarrel with Fate, but to have one's whole life so absolutely empty is horrible." If such vacuous self-restraint may, by courtesy, be termed a virtue, it is but a negative virtue. The persons who achieve it, as the result of congenitally feeble sexual aptitudes, merely (as Gyurkovechky, Fuerbringer, and Loewenfeld have all alike remarked) made a virtue of their ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... inordinately vain. And when this strange dominant creature, royal by character as by birth, as strong as her father and as wanton as her mother, sat in ermine and velvet and pearls in a royal carriage, with shrewd-faced wits, and bright-eyed lovers, and solemn statesmen, and great nobles, vacuous and gallant, glittering and jingling before her; and troops of tall ladies in ruff and crimson mantle riding on white horses behind; and when the fanfares went shattering down the street, vibrating through the continuous roar of the crowd and the shrill cries of children and ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson

... quickly to his feet and in the instant his whole demeanor changed. From demoniacal rage he became suddenly convulsed with hysterical laughter although it was a question in the girl's mind as to which was the more terrifying. His companions stood looking on with vacuous grins upon their countenances, while he from whom the girl had wrested the weapon leaped up and down shrieking with laughter. If Bertha Kircher had needed further evidence to assure her that they were in the hands of a mentally deranged people the man's present actions would have been sufficient ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... previously felt concerning this new undertaking, and completely furnished her with the confident ease of mind which is required for the critical observation of surrounding objects. It was just that stage in the slow decline of the summer days, when the deep, dark, and vacuous hot-weather shadows are beginning to be replaced by blue ones that have a surface and substance to the eye. They trotted along the turnpike road for a distance of about a mile, which brought them just outside the village of ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy



Words linked to "Vacuous" :   vacuousness, mindless, foolish, vacuity, hollow, blank, fatuous, asinine, inane, meaningless, nonmeaningful, uncommunicative, empty



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