"Vacuity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and as easy to say that it is incredible; but it is wiser to remember the narrow bounds of our knowledge of the unseen world of being, and to be cautious in asserting that there is nothing beyond the horizon but vacuity. If there be unclean spirits, we know too little about them to say what is possible. Only this is plain—that the difficulty of supposing them to inhabit swine is less, if there be any difference, than of supposing them to inhabit men, since the animal nature, especially ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... shuffling feet, Mannie Kantor, so marred in the mysterious and ceramic process of life that the brain and the soul had stayed back sooner than inhabit him. Seventeen in years, in the down upon his face and in growth unretarded by any great nervosity of system, his vacuity of face was not that of childhood, but rather as if his light eyes were peering out from some hinterland and wanting so terribly and so dumbly to communicate what they beheld to brain-cells closed ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... thy native land. Ah, what, but hell, has Italy become? And thy sweet cords Still trembled at the touch of thy right hand, Unhappy bard of love. Alas, Italian song is still the child Of sorrow born. And yet, less hard to bear, Consuming grief than dull vacuity! O blessed thou, whose life was one lament! Disgust and nothingness are still our doom, And by our cradle sit, and on ...
— The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi • Giacomo Leopardi
... time to come—the old age when folk will call me the blind Mr. Torrens; will say of me:—'You know, he was not born blind—it was an accident—a gunshot wound—a long while back now.' And all that long while back will have been a long vacuity to me, and Heaven knows what burden to others.... I have known it all from the first. I knew it when I waked to my senses in the room upstairs—to all my senses but one. I knew it when I heard them speak hopefully of the case; hope means fear, and I knew what the fear was they were hoping ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... I did once make one of the nigger men let it down so I could look in it; but, Lord, child, I saw nothing but a great, black, deep vacuity, without bottom or sides. It put such a horror over me that I have never looked down there since, and ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... many men of education; not even among those who have been trained within their own schools. Educated natives, as a general rule, will stand apart from the truth; maintaining, at the best, a state of mental vacuity which hangs suspended, for a time, between an atheism, from which they shrink, and a Christianity, which fails to overcome their fears and constrain their allegiance." Extract from Letter of the Anglican Bishops of India, ...
— The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan • H. G. Keene
... Magi is that in the predella of the tabernacle of the Linen Weavers' Guild. Now, while the Adoration in the Cortona predella is naturally and simply pourtrayed, that of Florence is conventional and stiff, the vacuity of some figures and their actions is very evident—therefore this similitude also reduces itself to mere identity of subject. The Assumption of the Virgin also offers very notable differences. The predella at Cortona is more intense ...
— Fra Angelico • J. B. Supino
... people are rendered sociable by their ability to endure solitude, that is to say, their own society. They become sick of themselves. It is this vacuity of soul which drives them to intercourse with others,—to travels in foreign countries. Their mind is wanting in elasticity; it has no movement of its own, and so they try to give it some,—by drink, for instance. How much drunkenness is due to ...
— Counsels and Maxims - From The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... tried to read, but I could not; I tried to eat, but my appetite was gone, I sat looking at the ocean as it rolled wave after wave, sometimes wondering whether it would ever bring a fellow-creature to join me; at others I sat, and for hours, in perfect vacuity of thought. The evening closed in; it was dark, and I still remained seated where I was. At last I returned to my bed, almost brokenhearted; but fortunately I was soon asleep, and my sorrows ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Marryat
... absence; inexistence &c 2 [Obs.]; nonresidence, absenteeism; nonattendance, alibi. emptiness &c adj.; void, vacuum; vacuity, vacancy; tabula rasa [Lat.]; exemption; hiatus &c (interval) 198; lipotype^. truant, absentee. nobody; nobody present, nobody on earth; not a soul; ame qui vive [Fr.]. V. be absent &c adj.; keep away, keep out of the way; play truant, absent oneself, stay away; keep ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... other religious denominations [did]. But the courts decided that Saint-Simonism was not a religion and its ministers were not religious teachers. This decision struck them with death. Their prestige vanished. They scattered, dissolved in thin air, and went off, as Carlyle would say, into endless vacuity, as do sooner or later all ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... more decent sort, seem not seldom to be nearly destitute of religious resources. The Sunday is with them, to say the best of it, a heavy day; and that larger part of it, which is not claimed by the public offices of the church, dully drawls on in comfortless vacuity, or without improvement is trifled away in vain and unprofitable discourse. Not to speak of those who by their more daring profanation of this sacred season, openly violate the laws and insult the religion of their country, how little do many seem to enter ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... who poke their noses into other people's affairs, retail all the scandal, and hand on all the slander and gossip of empty and, therefore, evil minds. They are invariably well to do and without any work or responsibilities. They go gadding about restless and feverish because of the empty vacuity of their lives, a prey to worry because they have nothing else to do. If I were to put down and faithfully report the conversations I have with such people; the fool worries they are really distressed with; ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... slit which served for a window, "Is he not there?—stand out o' the light, and let me look upon him ance mair. But the darkness is in my ain een," she said, sinking back, after an earnest gaze upon vacuity—"it's ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... little of what transpired outside could be seen through the thick glass ports. The pirate ship loomed over them like a monstrous leech, its bolts sharply etched in black and white by the sunlight from their stern. Beyond that was only the velvety darkness—the absolute vacuity of space that carries no sound, refracts no light. A battle was raging out there, but of that nothing could be seen or heard in the salon. Only a dull, booming vibration through the flyer's hull, made by the rockets in a useless effort ...
— In the Orbit of Saturn • Roman Frederick Starzl
... smoothed for a moment the pillow of an "upper berth," and pleased better than the negro porter. Half a dozen of those days of too many paper novels, of too much tobacco, of too little else, followed each other with the sameness of so many raw oysters. Then there came a chill night of wide moonlit vacuity passed on the prairie by the side of the driver of a "jumper,"—a driver who slumbered, happy man!—and at peep of dawn I found myself standing, stiff and shivering, in a certain little Texas town. A much-soiled, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... and maintained that it was an absurdity to wash a face which was of necessity always clean. I don't know how much fancy there was in this; but there is no fancy in saying that the lassitude of tired-out operatives, and the languor of imaginative natures in their periods of collapse, and the vacuity of minds untrained to labor and discipline, fit the soul and body for the germination of the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... his father was worth, which, as he pointed out, was a trifle no man of the world dwelt on. Stalky envied aloud, and I delivered my first kick at The Infant's ankle. Thence we drifted to education, and the Average Army Man, and the desolating vacuity—I remember these words—of Army Society, notably among its womenkind. It appeared there was some sort of narrow convention in the Army against mentioning a woman's name at Mess. We were much surprised at this—Stalky would not let me express my surprise—but we took it from Mr. Wontner, who said ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... Picts, attentive to every advantage, rushed with redoubled violence into this vacuity. The Britons, who could find no protection but in slavery, again implore the assistance of their former masters. At that time Aetius commanded the imperial forces in Gaul, and with the virtue and military skill of the ancient Romans supported the Empire, tottering with age and weakness. Though ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... and undertook to remodel the Cathedral of S. Francis at Rimini. He found it a plain Gothic structure with apse and side chapels. Such churches are common enough in Italy, where pointed architecture never developed its true character of complexity and richness, but was doomed to the vast vacuity exemplified in S. Petronio of Bologna. He left it a strange medley of mediaeval and Renaissance work, a symbol of that dissolving scene in the world's pantomime, when the spirit of classic art, as yet but little comprehended, was encroaching on the early Christian ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... assizes—it was not deemed perfectly safe to visit the village, and even the police would not have adventured on the step except with a responsible force. At other periods, the most marked feature of the place would be that of utter vacuity and desolation. A single inhabitant here and there smoking listlessly at his door—a group of women, with their arms concealed beneath their aprons, crouching under a ruined wall—or a few ragged children, too miserable and dispirited ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... Physician and Astrologer; as to years, just over the grand climacteric, sixty-three, mystical multiple of nine and seven; dispensing counsel from his lodgings at Shire Lane, and seeking occasional rest in the vacuity of thought proper to his ...
— Isaac Bickerstaff • Richard Steele
... the dancers, as I have already remarked, were of the blood royal and one, I was told, was in the direct line of succession. Judging from the vacuity of his expression, the Dutch have no reason to anticipate any difficulty in maintaining their mastery in Soerakarta when he comes to the throne. But the Dutch officials take no chances with the intrigue-loving native princes; they keep them under close surveillance at ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... embellishing some puerile stories, which a man of sense will inevitably reject as too trivial for his gravity or too fantastical for his faith. That nation is happy, according to a common adage, which furnishes little business to the historian; for such a vacuity in facts argues a condition of perfect peace and silent prosperity. That childhood is happy, or may generally be presumed such, which has furnished few records of external experience, little that has appeared in doing or in suffering to the eyes of companions; for the child who has ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... of Maastricht, how they stretch themselves out into deep passages and vast squares, in which sound is lost, and where the light, which cannot reach the nearest object, only glimmers like a point of fire. In order to comprehend this vacuity and this darkness, the travellers let the guide extinguish his torch, and all is night; they are penetrated, as it were, with darkness; the hand feels after a wall, in order to have some restraint, some thought on which to repose itself: the eye ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... love-transaction: the one who loves and the other who condescends to be so treated. Perhaps the love is occasionally on the man's side; perhaps on the lady's. Perhaps some infatuated swain has ere this mistaken insensibility for modesty, dulness for maiden reserve, mere vacuity for sweet bashfulness, and a goose, in a word, for a swan. Perhaps some beloved female subscriber has arrayed an ass in the splendour and glory of her imagination; admired his dulness as manly simplicity; worshipped his selfishness as manly superiority; treated his stupidity ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... doctor to the sea, but with instructions to avoid for the present all excitement, sunlight, and color, Derek and his grandmother repaired to a spot well known to be gray, and Nedda went home to Hampstead. This was the last week in July. A fortnight spent in the perfect vacuity of an English watering-place restored the boy wonderfully. No one could be better trusted than Frances Freeland to preserve him from looking on the dark side of anything, more specially when that thing was already not quite nice. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... day on weary day went by, And like the drooping autumn leaf, She faded slow and silently, In her deep, uncomplaining grief; For, sick of life's vacuity, She neither sought nor wished relief. And daily from her cheek, the glow Departed, and her virgin brow Was curtained with a mournful gloom,— A shade prophetic, of the tomb; And her clear eyes, so blue and ...
— Mazelli, and Other Poems • George W. Sands
... puzzled feeling concerning his arrest. Things had not proceeded as he had planned. If the Elder would but come to him, all would be right. He tried to analyze his feelings, and the thought that possessed him most was wonder at the strange vacuity of the condition of emotionlessness. Was it that he had so suffered that he was no longer capable of feeling? What was feeling? What was emotion: and life without either emotion, or feeling, or caring to feel,—what ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... to pay, the guest-houses, with their straw-coloured wine in quaint carafes, the rich stews served in grey earthenware dishes streaked with blue, the dancing, the caressing, the singular absence of all elderly women, strikes on the mind with a quite peculiar sense of boredom and vacuity, because Morris seems to have eliminated so many sources of human interest, and to have conformed every one to a type, which is refreshing enough as a contrast, but very tiresome in the mass. It will not be enough to have got rid of the combative and sordid and vulgar elements of the world unless ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Kendal, but speaking rather as if from duty than from conviction. 'There are many sources of happiness, even if shipwreck have been made on one venture. Your aunt had few resources to which to turn her mind. Every pursuit or study is a help stored up against the vacuity which renders ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the pain and distress were wiped from his face by sodden vacuity. He had hitched himself to one of the poplars, and now leaned against this, his head bent on his shoulder at the sickening angle of a man hanged, his eyes glassy, his mouth open, a trickle of saliva flowing from one corner. He breathed hard and loudly. There was nothing ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield |
