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More "Meaningless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... The theory that there were originally two parallel outer walls, that Darius razed one and Herodotus saw the other (Baumstark in Pauly-Wissowa, Real-Encycl. ii. 2696), is meaningless. There could be no use in razing one and leaving the other, which was almost as strong (Hdt. i. 181). It is, however, not quite certain that Herodotus (i. 181) meant that there were ...
— Ancient Town-Planning • F. Haverfield
... up to her flat and had a little cry. It was a meaningless cry, the kind of cry that only a woman knows about, a cry from no particular cause, altogether an absurd cry; the most transient and the most hopeless cry in the repertory of grief. Why had Martin never thrashed her? ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... flocking presences of the dead, the shock of imaginations that had no words, of quixotic emotions which the stranger had stirred in that low, mocking, furtive talk beside the broken stones of the Huguenot. Was the 'change' quite so monstrous, so meaningless? How often, indeed, he remembered curiously had he seemed to be standing outside these fast-shut gates of thought, that now had been freely ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... far from finding life unintelligible, it would be nearer the truth to say that man's reason can, strictly speaking, understand nothing else.[22] 'Instinct finds,' says Bergson, 'but does not search. Reason searches but cannot find.'[23] 'But,' adds Professor Dewey, 'what we find is meaningless save as measured by searching, and so instincts and passions must be elevated into reason.'[24] In the lower creatures instinct does the {65} work of reason—sufficiently for the simple conditions in which the animal lives. And in the earlier ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... cross-reference between sections or chapters for the (now meaningless) cross-references between pages. Also, like many books of that day, the original had many page headings such as "MYTHICAL ETYMOLOGIES" or "HILL AND DALE", without incorporating them in the table of contents or the text, or even making it clear just where those page headings fitted into ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... moment. . . . But it isn't quite as easy as all that, my dear fellow. In times of unrest power comes automatically more and more into the hands of the man who can talk; men like Ramage, and others of his kidney. A few meaningless but high flown phrases; a few such parrot cries as 'Down with the Capitalist and the Future is for the Worker,' and you've got even the steadiest man unsettled. . . . Especially if he's one of a crowd; mob psychology is the devil. . . ." Sir James paused and stared out of the window. "I don't ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... and classes. Among them were perhaps one thousand, perhaps two thousand, copies of the newspaper. Some ten thousand people were craning necks and straining eyes to read those papers. The rest were making short, hoarse, frequently meaningless ejaculations. ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... human sympathies. Back River, Bush River, Gunpowder Creek,—lives there the man with soul so dead that his memory has cerements to wrap up these senseless names in the same envelopes with their meaningless localities? But the Susquehanna,—the broad, the beautiful, the historical, the poetical Susquehanna,—the river of Wyoming and of Gertrude, dividing the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... senseless day, after its happy but meaningless triviality, the throng and mixed perfumery and silly courteous gestures, his blessed solitude! Oh solitude, that noble peace of the mind! He loved the throng and multitude of the day: he loved people: but sometimes ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... revealed the window of the garden-room driven bodily inward, shutters and all, and now forming an inclined bridge over Dougal's ineffectual tubs. In front of it stood McGuffog, swinging his gun by the barrel and yelling curses, which, being mainly couched in the vernacular, were happily meaningless to Saskia. She herself stood at the hall door, plucking at something hidden in her breast. He saw that it was a ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... great open space of Smithfield, in London, on one side of which stood the venerable Abbey of Saint Bartholomew, now occupied by the hospital of that name. The men who composed it were rough and wild, and, for the most part, shouted and clutched their clubs and bows in a meaningless sort of way, which plainly showed that they were not very clear in their own minds as to the object of their assembling together, but that they came and shouted and threatened because their leaders ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... as an adjective or with an adjective sense. "Quality clothes" is meaningless: "Clothes of quality" equally so. All clothes have quality and the expression has meaning only when the quality is defined as good, bad, high, ...
— Word Study and English Grammar - A Primer of Information about Words, Their Relations and Their Uses • Frederick W. Hamilton
... never accepted purely social invitations from white persons. He always claimed that he could best satisfy his social desires among his own people. He believed that the question of so-called "social equality" between the races was too academic and meaningless to be worthy of ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... would come with his army at his back, it was an absurd proposal. If it meant that he would come alone, it was a falsehood. In either case it was a device to fritter away time. [Sidenote: Sulla's astuteness and superstition.] For all the while that he was bandying meaningless messages he continued his onward march. He had sacrificed, and the soothsayer Postumius, when he saw the entrails, had stretched out his hands to him, and offered to be kept in chains for punishment after the battle if it was not a victory. ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... particularly in the home, as infra dignitatem and hence intolerable. Out of' that notion arise many lamentable phenomena. On the one hand, we have the spectacle of a great number of healthy and well-fed women engage in public activities that, nine times out of ten, are meaningless, mischievous and a nuisance, and on the other hand we behold such a decay in the domestic arts that, at the first onslaught of the late war, the national government had to import a foreign expert ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... exceptions, did not impress me more favorably here than at the Champs-Elysees. They have a used-up look; their features are meaningless, or rather they have all the same meaning. The proud, stalwart bearing which we find in the portraits of our ancestors—men who joined moral to physical vigor—has disappeared. Yet in this gathering there was one ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... tinker's tools, and seen the lives of the poor, and the woe of them, and the wretchedness of it all, and the utter uselessness of everything, and the horrible, intolerable, unending pain of all the things that breathe, one comes to think that in this meaningless mystery which men call life a little laughter and a little love are the only things which save us all from madness—the madness that would curse ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... the solitary performer. And the poor actress was growing old, wasting her smiles, and her poses, and her bursts of laughter, and her sudden entries on the empty air, till by mechanical repetition they had grown so meaningless as to be almost ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... Havelock Ellis' "Psychology of Sex" are fully at your disposal. But the more this species of truth is given out, the more life itself, for which you educate the child, will appear to him unworthy and meaningless. If the truth of civilized life is merely that which natural science can analyze, then life has lost its honour and its loyalty, its enthusiasm and its value. He who sees the truth in the idealistic aspect of man will not necessarily evade the curious ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... when I had leisure to observe outside matters, I perceived that among the other actors in the drama confusion still reigned. There was much scuttering about and much meaningless shouting. Mr Abney's reedy tenor voice was issuing directions, each of which reached a dizzier height of futility than the last. Glossop was repeating over and over again the words, 'Shall I telephone for the police?' to which nobody ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... we have already finished. Some review there must be, for certain things are specially hard to keep in mind, and have to be gone over and over, lest they fade into forgetfulness. But there must be continued progress in a life school. There is no parrot repetition, sing-song, meaningless, of words that have ceased to be vital. New lessons are to be learned as fast as the old ones are understood. Of what use to set Polly tasks to develop her bravery, when ...
— Polly Oliver's Problem • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... Sent him away with the notes of a melody floating through his brain, so that the merry laugh of his children will be a discord, and such a memory of a soft glance, that his wife's bright look will be meaningless.' ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... in the tradition of 'the three kings of Cologne,' and in the Arabian story of the 'Three Calenders.' The line quoted by Thomson, (Shakspeare, by Thomson, Vol. X. p. 701.) 'Under which King Bezonian, speak or die!' (though we agree with him in preferring his pointing to the ordinary and meaningless 'Under which King, Bezonian,' etc.) unhappily can throw no light on the present passage till we know how many King Bezonians are intended, and who they were. Perhaps we should read Belzonian, and suppose a reference to the Egyptian monarchs ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... Demming? Why don't you realize, that I'm the only man in existence who has no need for money, who can't spend money? That my fellow men—whom I've done such a good job of betraying—have honored me to a point where money is meaningless?" ...
— Medal of Honor • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... a demonstration of method, is not altogether meaningless, even without the text beside it, shows the accuracy and nicety of his criticism. And Avril contains a number of similar observations which are valuable in the extreme as aids to judgement and ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... greater part of the morning with the new heiress, and Lydia had listened, speechless, as he recited a long and meaningless list of securities, of estates, of ground rents, balances and the like, which she ...
— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace
... realizes how much other variations of position influence the psychological effect. Starch[51] made experiments in which he did not use real advertisements, but meaningless syllables so as to exclude the influence of familiarity with any announcement. He arranged little booklets, each of 12 pages, on which a syllable such as lod, zan, mep, dut, yib, and so on was printed in the middle of each page. Each of his 50 subjects glanced over the book and then ...
— Psychology and Industrial Efficiency • Hugo Muensterberg
... a man who handles tools, hung down by his new black trousers. Ev'leen Ann's strong fingers stood out stiffly from one another. They looked hard at the minister and repeated after him in low and meaningless tones the solemn and touching words of the marriage service. Back of them stood the wedding company, in freshly washed and ironed white dresses, new straw hats, and black suits smelling of camphor. In the background, among the other elders, ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... avenue. Dorn felt a return of interest in himself. Introspection bored him. His insincerity made self thought meaningless. Listeners, however, revived him. As they walked he caught occasional glimpses of his companion—vivid eyes, dark lips, a cool, shadow-tinted face that belonged under exotic trees; a morose little girl insanely sensitive and with a dream inside ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... with figures and writing relating to this work. These papers justified the subsequent verdict of the Coroner's jury that Hunter committed suicide in a fit of temporary insanity, for they were covered with a lot of meaningless scribbling, the words wrongly spelt and having no intelligible connection with each other. There was one sum that he had evidently tried repeatedly to do correctly, but which came wrong in a different way every time. The fact that he had the razor in his possession seemed to point ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... ill-fitting halos and imitation wings, singing meaningless hymns which Priscilla ...
— A Parody Outline of History • Donald Ogden Stewart
... earnest those meaningless French ejaculations, whispered something about Him who alone can comfort ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... good-humouredly. "There, I think that will do now, with a strip or two of plaster which I have here," producing some diachylon from a pocket-book. "How do you feel now?" he added, addressing himself to the boy, who had kept his eyes fixed on his face in the same meaningless stare as when he had first ...
— Picked up at Sea - The Gold Miners of Minturne Creek • J.C. Hutcheson
... Mr. Stackpole bade him a cheerful good day. At the sound of the words the Swiss spun on his heel, then gulped audibly and backed away, flinching almost as though a blow had been aimed at him. He muttered some meaningless something, confusedly: he stared at Mr. Stackpole with widened eyes like one who beholds an apparition in the broad of the day; he stepped on his own feet and got in his own way as he shrank to the outer edge of the narrow pavement. ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... through his mind as he watched him across the cigar smoke. The rattling of that donkey-engine, the shouts of the lightermen, the thuds of the sulfur-sacks—how ridiculous they all sounded, the clatter of a futile, meaningless existence where men gathered—rubbish, for mere bodies that lived amid dust a few years, then returned to ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... the least guess its significance, though we imagined that it must be preliminary to some sacrifice or offering. It was like the fragment of a nightmare preserved by the awakened senses in all its mad, meaningless reality. ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... to him of his broker. On the other hand, provisions purporting to entitle the broker in disregard of his duties as broker himself to act as principal, would be rejected by the courts as radically inconsistent with the primary object of the contract of brokerage and, therefore, meaningless. But it is undoubtedly too often the practice of brokers who are members of exchanges to consider themselves entitled to act as principals and sell on their own account to their own clients, particularly in futures. The causes of this opinion, erroneously, though quite ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... look strange to us,—when the darling of our hearts is ruthlessly torn away, and we sit in the darkness of the tomb,—when shame for the living lost bows us to the earth in anguish,—when life has become meaningless, and nothing remains to vitalize the monotony of existence,—when we look upon our own past hopes, ambitions, interests, as though they characterized some other being, long since departed,—when the morning light and the evening shade, May's sweet flowers and November's yellow leaves, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... violence. More than once the young man and Mademoiselle de Fontaine walked, tete-a-tete, in the avenues of the garden, where nature was dressed like a woman going to a ball. More than once they had those conversations, aimless and meaningless, in which the emptiest phrases are those which cover the deepest feelings. They often admired together the setting sun and its gorgeous coloring. They gathered daisies to pull the petals off, and sang the most impassioned ...
— The Ball at Sceaux • Honore de Balzac
... had clearly become a caballero since those early days of adventure. Hillyard noted the point for his own guidance, thanking his stars meanwhile that the gift of the house was a meaningless politeness. ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... last, and there was a general movement. She went with the crowd, Mercer's last words still running through her brain with a reiteration that made them almost meaningless. On the other side of the Customs house! Of course, of course she would find ...
— Rosa Mundi and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... he put it?" asked Willie, abstractedly, as he tried to read some meaning into the grocer's apparently meaningless acts. ...
— The Secret Wireless - or, The Spy Hunt of the Camp Brady Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss
... even as this Francesca of Mr. Marion Crawford? I think so; she has taken bad plays as willingly as good plays, to turn them to her own purpose, and she has been as triumphant, if not as fine, in bad plays as in good ones. Now her Francesca is lifeless, a melodious image, making meaningless music. She says over the words, cooingly, chantingly, or frantically, as the expression marks, to which she seems to act, demand. The interest is ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... "is that any reason, Bertrand, why you should pause to listen to the voices whose cry is meaningless? Think! Remember the blind folly of it all. A decade, a cycle of years, and the men who pass you in Pall Mall, and the women who smile at you from their carriages, will be dead and gone. You—you may become the Emperor of ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... are now the masters of the continent. England is thus made a nullity; the "celsa sedet in Eolus in arce," which Canning delighted to quote, to express the moderating function which he wished to reserve for his country, is now a meaningless phrase. Let not your preachers of the theory of material interests, your speculators upon extended markets deceive themselves; there is history to teach them that political influence and commercial influence ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... the candidacy and platform of Bell were meaningless, those of both Lincoln and Breckinridge, Sectional, and that he alone bore aloft the standard of the entire Union; while, on the other hand, the supporters of Lincoln, his chief antagonist, claimed that—as the burden of the song from the lips of ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... felt the exuberance of being in touch with affairs of import. Hitherto the mill had been merely a greedy monster claiming her freedom and draining her energies in tasks routine, such as the copying of meaningless documents and rows of figures; now, supplied with stimulus and a motive, the Corporation began to take on significance, and she flung herself into the work with an ardour hitherto unknown, determined to make herself so valuable to Ditmar that the time would come when he could not do without her. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... all his offices. For nearly three centuries after the one-man power had become absolute, Rome continued to call itself a republic, to go through forms of election and ceremonial, which grew ever more and more meaningless ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... the taboo enforced by a Morals Police is, perhaps, as good a way as any of gaining a fictitious sense of activity. But the ideal of "annihilation" becomes an irrelevant and meaningless phrase. If lust is deeply rooted in men and its only expression is evil, I for one should recommend a faith in the millennium. You can put this Paradise at the beginning of the world or the end of it. Practical ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... What makes such work sound unreal is not the praise of Ibsen, but the praise of the novelty of Ibsen. Any advantage that Bernard Shaw had over Colonel Craven I have over Bernard Shaw; we who happen to be born last have the meaningless and paltry triumph in that meaningless and paltry war. We are the superiors by that silliest and most snobbish of all superiorities, the mere aristocracy of time. All works must become thus old and insipid which have ever tried to be "modern," which have ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... a book," and I tried to explain what the idea was, and read out a few lines; it happened to be Pickwick. They were absorbed. Slim said, half to himself, "Something like a glass," which I thought quite meaningless at the time. Then I showed them a picture in another book. That ...
— The Five Jars • Montague Rhodes James
... to comfort her tears with promises, unsubstantial nutriment indeed, and they could not satisfy the child, who failed dismally to understand them. Through the green blinds came the noise of life and health and merriment; curses too, sometimes, but only the curses of the well fed, and therefore meaningless. Already the sun fell hot and indomitable on the room, and the atmosphere at their touch became stifling. Gregorio, swallowing his tears, tore out into the street, shouting up the narrow stairway hysterical words ...
— Stories by English Authors: Africa • Various
... always secretive and conservative in his dealings. Only to Mr. Mallowe, Mr. Rockamore and Mr. Carlis did he ever divulge his plans to the slightest extent. A bankrupt! My father a bankrupt? The very words seem meaningless to me. Dr. Franklin, there must be some ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... incredibility pounded at him again, making the blood sing in his ears. Nothing heard at school or from the Parson—who had long perturbed himself as to the right moment for explanations—had started those first warning notes, but words freely bandied across his head at home as a little boy, and then meaningless to him—words that had since echoed back on to fuller knowledge ominously. If it had not been that Archelaus, the free-speaker and the vindictive One of the family, was still in Australia, and that Ishmael spent a large part of his holidays with friends of the Parson's in Devon and Somerset, the ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... aware that Pao-yue was gifted with such a peculiar temperament, that he even looked upon flattering or auspicious phrases with utter aversion, treating them as meaningless and consequently insincere, so when, after listening to those truths, she had spoken with such pathos, he, lapsed into another of his melancholy moods, she blamed herself for the want of consideration she had betrayed. ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... admit "all comers" to the Altar. To give way on such a point would be to forfeit, and rightly to forfeit, the respect of any law-abiding people, and would be—in many cases, is—"a great discredit, and a serious peril" to the Church. We have few enough rules as it is, and if those that we have are meaningless, we may well be held up to derision. The Prayer Book makes no provision whatever for those who are not Confirmed, and who, if able to receive Confirmation, are neither "ready nor ...
— The Church: Her Books and Her Sacraments • E. E. Holmes
... could have seen aught. Perhaps had one been there to point them out to us, we might have noted indentations in the mud, but there were countless indentations, one overlapping another into a confusion that would have been entirely meaningless to us. To Tarzan each told its own story. Tantor, the elephant, had passed that way as recently as three suns since. Numa had hunted here the night just gone, and Horta, the boar, had walked slowly along the trail within an hour; but what held Tarzan's attention was the ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... together with instructions to multiply, subtract, extract roots, et cetera, which are similarly chosen at random and not known to anyone. Once in twenty times or so, Schweeringen predicts the result of this meaningless computation before the computer has made it. This is incredible! The odds are trillions to one against it! Since nobody knows the sums or instructions given to the computer, it cannot be mind-reading in any form. It must be pure precognition. ...
— The Leader • William Fitzgerald Jenkins (AKA Murray Leinster)
... a common and almost meaningless remark, that one has to be careful to avoid being lost in New York, but the words "Lost in New York" have a deeper meaning than the thoughtless speakers imagine. If the curious would know the full force of these words, let them ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... Voodoo and Obeah forms of magic. Some writers have spoken of it under the name "elementary," but as that title has at one time or other been used for almost every variety of post-mortem entity, it has become so vague and meaningless that it is perhaps better to ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater
... trumpets keep up their gobble. Groups of polite and frivolous persons pass and repass like fantastic shadows: childish bands of small-eyed mousmes with smile so candidly meaningless and coiffures shining through their bright silver flowers; ugly men waving at the end of long branches their eternal lanterns shaped like birds, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... parents! As we grow older, are we not taught who we are—taught call God our Father—taught about Jesus Christ, who He is, and what He is? Is that, too, nothing? Alas! that knowledge is generally a mere meaningless school-lesson, cared for neither by child nor by man. At confirmation, again, we solemnly declare that we belong to Christ's kingdom, and that we will live as His subjects, and His alone. And we are brought to His bishops, to be received as free, reasonable, Christian people, to claim ...
— Twenty-Five Village Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... pass him over, nor why there may not be something peculiarly valuable in the noble freedom and genuine modernism of his poetic spirit, to an age that is apparently only forsaking the clerical idyll of one school, for the reactionary mediaevalism or paganism, intrinsically meaningless and issueless, ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 3: Byron • John Morley
... The planets and satellites of Sol had proven comparatively tractable and those that were suited to man-life were quickly brought under his dominion. But there, of course, he had the advantage of proximity. The time involved in running back and forth to the home planet was meaningless and all Earth's resources could be thrown into ...
— Adaptation • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... details of tea manufacture, of the repeated, meaningless, tossing back and forth and Chinese juggling with the abused tea leaves, are but too familiar to students of the subject: and too disappointing also, when we are moved to ask—Why all this manipulation? What is the nature of the chemical changes ...
— Tea Leaves • Francis Leggett & Co.
... person, or small group of persons of ordinary intelligence, can train themselves to be equal to this. A very simple instance occurred in the earliest experiences of the writer. After three or four sittings round a small table with two friends, at which there was meaningless tipping, and nothing better than commonplace sentences, the following was tipped out: "Try no more to move"—then this succession of letters—"a t a t a." It seemed useless to go on with nonsense, but one of the party suggested perseverance; when the following conclusion ...
— Psychic Phenomena - A Brief Account of the Physical Manifestations Observed - in Psychical Research • Edward T. Bennett
... us into the minds and souls of one another, there to deposit a judgment or a sympathy, or whatever our nature suggests at sight of our neighbor's failings. In obeying such an impulse one can easily peer through the conventional veil which screens such phases of human character under the meaningless appellations of "Blues," or "Indisposition." They are truly the visible effect of a secret hidden cause, which is sometimes brought to the surface by the magnetic power of one who has studied human ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... power is not distinguished. In any case, however, that graphic power must have been subordinate to their effect as pink spots, while the band of green-blue round the plate's edge, and the spots of gold, pretend to no graphic power at all, but are meaningless spaces of color or metal. Still less have they any mechanical office: they add nowise to the serviceableness of the plate; and their agreeableness, if they possess any, depends, therefore, neither on any imitative, nor any structural, character; ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... racial solidarity. The French, more fluid and sensitive to the incongruous, have introduced local colour into some of their Colonial buildings, not without success. As to this particular Roman tradition, it pursues one with meaningless iteration from the burning sands of Africa to Ultima Thule. Always those four ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... linking them together as far as they would fit, and quite ignorant that presently the remaining half would suddenly be given him, and with almost no trouble would at once fit into the gaps he had necessarily left, and transform a meaningless pattern into a perfect and intelligible whole. Let us consider some of these map pieces. The ultimate picture was the conception of the whole world of life, past and present, as a single family tree growing up from the simplest possible roots, and gradually ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... as she moved about her stateroom setting in order the books, magazines, flowers, and candy, with which Banneker had sought to fortify her against the tedium of the trip. As the time for departure drew near, they fell into and effortfully maintained that meaningless, banal, and jerky talk which is the inevitable concomitant of long partings between people who, really caring for each other, can find nothing but commonplaces wherewith to ease their stress of mind. Miss Van Arsdale's common sense came ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... and awkward, laughed hysterically, flung out a few meaningless phrases. Margaret murmured: "Perhaps you'd rather go?" She wished him to go, now that she had ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... music, ranged around the walls. One girl at the organ is graceful; another with a tambourine has a sort of Bassarid beauty. But the group of Apollo, Pegasus, and a Muse upon Parnassus, is a failure in its meaningless frigidity, while few of these subordinate compositions show power of ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... also puts printed or written papers in a machine which is run like a clock. Well, this is an easy way to say prayers. And are there not many prayers offered, not merely by Chinamen, that are machine prayers, soulless, heartless, meaningless, and faithless, and which bring no answer? But how simple, how beautiful, how sublime, the golden Prayer which the Divine Master taught His disciples! Lord, teach us how to pray. If the noble Liturgy of the Church is properly rendered,—for it is the expansion of the Lord's ...
— By the Golden Gate • Joseph Carey
... with feelings of bitter hatred against his former friend; and it is probable that wounded pride worked upon him as violently as disappointed passion. He was heard by several persons to utter vows of vengeance—rarely meaningless in that uncivilised island—and few were surprised when next day the news spread that Giustiniani had disappeared. Public opinion at once pointed to Bartuccio as the murderer. He was arrested, and a ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 445 - Volume 18, New Series, July 10, 1852 • Various
... suffering, unconscious tortures, it is harder to speak—of the innocent, for so they are, victims of lust and brutality in Babylon here, whose sense of suffering is almost gone, and is succeeded by nothing but the desire for rest; all this seems so meaningless, ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... lost all its power over me. A stone has more feeling than I. I don't love to pray. I am sick and tired of this dreadful struggle after holiness; good books are all alike, flat and meaningless. But I must have something to absorb and carry me away, and I have come back to my music and my drawing with new zest. Mother was right in warning me against giving them up. Maria Kelley is teaching me to paint in oil-colors, and says I have ...
— Stepping Heavenward • Mrs. E. Prentiss
... good-natured, kindly dispositioned man, and in theory he was delighted to pay periodical visits to the wife and children of his dead brother William; in practice, he infinitely preferred the comfort and seclusion of his own house and garden, and the companionship of his books and his parrot to these rather meaningless and tiresome incursions into a family circle with which he had little in common. It was not so much the spur of his own conscience that drove him to make the occasional short journey by rail to visit his relatives, as an obedient concession to the more insistent but vicarious conscience ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... "voyages to the moon," but none of higher merit than the one just mentioned. That of Bergerac is utterly meaningless. In the third volume of the "American Quarterly Review" will be found quite an elaborate criticism upon a certain "journey" of the kind in question—a criticism in which it is difficult to say whether the critic most exposes the stupidity of the book, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... not answer. The clutch of forty-eight hours of wakeful activity was upon him. The words of Old Andy were only so much of a meaningless jumble to him. Into the car he stumbled, a doddering, red-eyed thing, to drink his coffee as the rest drank it, to shamble to the stove, forgetful of the steaming, rancid air, then like some tired beast, sink to the ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... but we don't now." She laughed a little bitterly. "Poor Nat! I am only another trial added to your long list. Your beliefs, your ideals are meaningless to me—mere narrow-minded dogmas, stifling thought. Nellie was the wife Nature had intended for you, so soon as she had lost her beauty and with it all her worldly ideas. Fate was maturing her for you, if only we had known. As for me, I ought to have been the wife ...
— The Philosopher's Joke • Jerome K. Jerome
... the other's cold dry hand for an instant. The men who had overheard the short conversation looked upon it as a meaningless incident, the memory of which would disappear from the lieutenant's brain ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... initiations are not only exceedingly impressive and beautiful, but really instructive. It may also be added that they are never tedious, which will be agreeable information to those who, in entering secret societies, have been dragged through long, meaningless rigmaroles, conscious of being made a spectacle of, and preserving their temper only by the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... "hell" is the creation of the false philosophy which makes the eternal duality resolve itself into flesh and spirit or into soul and body. The power of love renders this symbol meaningless and abortive; for personality is the supreme victory of life over what resists life; and consequently where personality exists "hell" cannot exist; for personality is the scope and boundary of all we know. The symbol of "Satan" also is rendered meaningless ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... sobs diminished; she began to murmur broken, meaningless ejaculations of self-contempt; and to strain away from Jenny. At last she pushed Jenny from her, feverishly freeing herself, so that they stood apart, while Emmy blew her nose and wiped her eyes. ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... but stopped at the first shelter, and seating himself in the corner best protected from the wind, he examined the book at leisure. Nearly every page was scored with a meaningless jungle of pencil marks: rows of capital letters, short words, long words, complete sentences, copy-book tags. The whole thing, in fact, had the appearance of a copy-book, and on a more careful scrutiny Eustace thought that there was ample evidence ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... of course, he could not afford it. She was always so indelicate and awkward! She added a few meaningless words to save him the humiliation of ...
— Shallow Soil • Knut Hamsun
... grandly, and used such great big words!—"A good thing, too," Mrs Asplin averred. She wished the rest would follow her example, and not use so much foolish, meaningless slang.—Her eyes looked so bright and mocking, as if she were laughing at something all the time.—Poor, dear child! could she not talk as she liked? It was a great blessing she could be bright, poor ...
— About Peggy Saville • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... said. But they faltered and hung back at every utterance of his spasmodically uttered "now! now!" He scanned their faces eagerly, with a hope that gradually yielded to despondency. Their features were blank and inexpressive, as their answers had been meaningless or evasive. Several of them were of that class of quiet citizens, unaccustomed to any enterprises but those of trade, who are always slow to peril wealth by a direct issue with their despotism. They felt the truth of Bolivar's assertions. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... danger. He did not reply to it; he did not appear to have heard it. His eyes traveled over me, as though they had been sightless, and challenged Paul's. In the excitement of the moment, his words sounded tame, and almost meaningless. ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... mistress-of-the-house till a call ended, to stop to try to think it out. Later on, tonight, after the children were in bed, when she was brushing her hair . . . oh, probably she'd find as you so often did, when you went after the cause of some unexpected little feeling, that it came from a meaningless fortuitous association of ideas, like Elly's hatred of grape-jelly because she had once taken some ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... emotion struggling within his heart must burst forth at last and pervade the visible world. He was conscious of an impulse to sing, to laugh, to talk in broken sentences to himself; and any utterance, however slight and meaningless, seemed to relieve in a measure the nervous ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... precaution, for, on running into the bathroom one morning when every one else was downstairs, the eldest boy, Ronald, saw, floating in the bath, the body of a hoary-headed old man. It was bloated and purplish blue, and had big, glassy eyes that stared at him in such a hideous, meaningless manner that he uttered a scream of terror and fled. Alarmed at the noise, most of the household ran to see what had happened. Only the Captain remained behind. He knew only too well, and he hid, letting his wife ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... to Miss Margaret's movements, though there was nothing whatever of the ghost about Miss Margaret herself. She was a plump, short person, no longer young, with coal-black hair growing low on the forehead, and a round face that would have been nearly meaningless if the features had not been emphasized—italicized, so to speak—by the small-pox. Moreover, the brilliancy of her toilet would have rendered any ghostly hypothesis untenable. Mrs. Solomon (we refer to the ...
— A Rivermouth Romance • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... for the territory of the Maharaja of Kashmir are meaningless. In the huge Indus valley the incidence is only 4 persons per sq. mile. In Jammu and Kashmir it is 138. The map taken from the Census Report gives the details. The increase in the decade was on paper 8-1/2 p.c., distributed between 5-1/4 in Jammu, 12 in Kashmir, and 14 in the ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... is the vocabulary without the key; it is the lamp without the flame. Let the respected reader look or think over some old love-letters that he (or she) has had and forgotten, and try them over again. How blank and meaningless they seem! What glamour of infatuation was it which made that nonsense beautiful? One wonders that such puling and trash could ever have made one happy. And yet there were dates when you kissed those silly letters with rapture—lived upon six ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... plan, and what are incidental, is often more than we can readily determine in matters open to observation. And in plans executed mediately or indirectly, and for ends comprehensive and far-reaching, many purposed steps must appear to us incidental or meaningless. But the higher the intelligence, the more fully will the incidents enter into the plan, and the more universal and interconnected may the ends be. Trite as the remark is, it would seem still needful to insist that the failure ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... in her radiance; and Elise sat by the meagre fire trying to take interest in a novel. Although she had found it easy to be confident and self-assertive when the other girl was there, the solitariness of the flat and the silence of the street undermined her courage. The dragging minutes, the meaningless pages. . . . She wished that even Marian were there in all ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... one's mind to an instrument of companionship through which many may be led from a sense of isolation to one of civic responsibility, even as another type of club provides recreational facilities for those who have had only meaningless excitements, or, as a third type, opens new and interesting vistas of life to those who ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... corset, displacing the organs of her body, unfitting her to be a mother, causing more than half the surgical operations in the hospitals. She will then discuss character more than fashion. She will be ashamed of her silly, giggling and meaningless conversation. God said, "a man shall not wear that which pertains to a woman neither shall a woman put on a mans garment for all that do such things are an abomination unto God" women will then see the vulgarity and immodesty and sin in dressing in male attire ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation
... intellectual lyrics that no one will listen to. And all the critics will groan and grunt about "Dear old Pinafore." And I shall go on shining as a brilliantly meaningless ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... make it clear that it is not the reporters but the owners of the papers that should be censured. With the exception of a few garrulous and gushing geese, who think it smart to ask pert and meaningless questions, the male reporters that I have met have not only been serious and intelligent, but men with whom I have discussed literature, politics and religion; but it would not pay their editors, I presume, to publish conversations of this character. ...
— My Impresssions of America • Margot Asquith
... growth are, as a rule, useless. Being only the by-products of adaptive changes going on elsewhere, in any given case the chances are against these correlated effects being themselves of any utilitarian significance; and, therefore, as a matter of fact, correlated growths appear to be usually meaningless from the point of view of adaptation. Still, on the doctrine of chances, it is to be expected that sometimes a change of structure which has thus been indirectly produced by correlation of growth might happen to prove useful for some purpose or another; ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... seemed white and slender angels who would save me; but then, all at once, there came a most deadly nausea over my spirit, and I felt every fibre in my frame thrill as if I had touched the wire of a galvanic battery, while the angel forms became meaningless spectres, with heads of flame, and I saw that from them there would be no help. And then there stole into my fancy, like a rich musical note, the thought of what sweet rest there must be in the grave. The thought came gently and stealthily, and it seemed long before it attained full ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... must become Brahma. We must not shrink to avow this. Our existence is meaningless if we never can expect to realise the highest perfection that there is. If we have an aim and yet can never reach it, then it is no aim ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore
... surveyed the two men and boy, if not with indifference, at least with apathy. Just above his head swung the sign with its legend, "Slosson—Entertainment"; but if he were Slosson, one could take the last half of the sign either as a poetic rhapsody on the part of the painter, or the yielding to some meaningless convention, for in his person, Mr. Slosson suggested none of those qualities of brain or heart that trenched upon the lighter amenities of life. He was black-haired and bull-necked, and there was about him a certain shagginess which a recent toilet performed at the horse trough had ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... Herrick with a toothless smile that was shocking in its savagery; and his ear caught apparently by the trivial expression he had used, broke into a piece of the chorus of a comic song which he must have heard twenty years before in London: meaningless gibberish that, in that hour and place, seemed hateful as a blasphemy: 'Hikey, pikey, crikey, fikey, ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... commemorates our political freedom—a freedom which without economic freedom is meaningless indeed. Labor Day symbolizes our determination to achieve an economic freedom for the average man which will give his political ...
— The Fireside Chats of Franklin Delano Roosevelt • Franklin Delano Roosevelt
... and happy moment the massive gold candelabra—ancient things of a more luxurious age—and their opalescent shades. Against his advice the service, too, was of gold,—"rank vulgarity," he called it, with its rich meaningless ornamentation. But here Monty was obdurate. He insisted that he liked the color and that porcelain had no character. Mrs. Dan only prevented a quarrel by suggesting that several courses should be served ...
— Brewster's Millions • George Barr McCutcheon
... Volk's three charming pictures deserve to be better hung. The Stetson group illustrates the Impressionist method and result as well as anything in the Palace. Take his "Smugglers" or his "Summer Joy" (3311, 3317), and note how a few heavy and apparently meaningless dabs of color may be laid side by side on canvas in such a way that, when seen from a distance, they blend, until the picture not only outlines figures and foliage, but also glows with ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... inquisitive genius of the Renaissance opened for investigation. In the former of these regions we find two agencies at work—art and scholarship. During the Middle Ages the plastic arts, like philosophy, had degenerated into barren and meaningless scholasticism—a frigid reproduction of lifeless forms copied technically and without inspiration from debased patterns. Pictures became symbolically connected with the religious feelings of the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... you were by the very trifling margin of superiority that a hand known as a club flush bears over another hand consisting of three of the eights—not quite all of them, you understand, only three, and two other quite meaningless cards." ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... within, altogether drowning his summons for admission. He listened, perplexed. Light and rapid footsteps, the swishing of a silken skirt, a clear, musical laugh and cry of triumph, a succession of sounds which were wholly meaningless to him. Surely it was some sort of pandemonium. A momentary silence was followed by a chorus of voices. Reist raised his stick and knocked more loudly. A man's voice travelled out to him like ...
— The Traitors • E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim
... tired expecting by this time," returned Mollie practically. "Now will you please repeat that somewhat meaningless jumble of words, Betty dear? What was it—something about somebody's son having ...
— The Outdoor Girls at the Hostess House • Laura Lee Hope
... (1) That our current statecraft—its fundamental conceptions, its "axioms," its terminology—has become obsolete by virtue of the changed conditions of European society; that the causes of conflict which it creates are half the time based on illusions, upon meaningless and empty formulas; (2) that its survival is at bottom due to popular ignorance and indifference—the survival on the part of the great mass of just those conceptions born of the old and now obsolete conditions—since diplomacy, like all functions of government, is a reflection of ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... user and to the person addressed, of the signification of its terms. Its effectiveness is determined by the way in which it is employed, involving the choice of terms, as the true line for the false or meaningless one, the right value or note of color out of many that would almost do, the exact and specific word rather than the vague and feeble; involving also the combination of terms into articulate forms. These ways and methods ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... collections for some great purpose of study? Piece by piece the fragmentary spoils flow in upon him, of all sizes, shapes, and hues; a chaos of confused riches, perhaps only a wealth of rubbish, as they lie at his feet. One by one they fall into harmonious relations, until the meaningless heap has become a vast mosaic, where nothing is too minute to fill some interstice, nothing too angular to fit some corner, nothing so dull or brilliant of tint that it will not furnish its fraction of light or shadow. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... to the ritual act or the words used to designate it. Neither the ethnologist nor the priestly apologist will, as a rule, admit that he does not know why such ritual acts as pouring out water or burning incense are performed, and that they are wholly inexplicable and meaningless to him. Nor will they confess that the real inspiration to perform such rites is the fact of their predecessors having handed them down as sacred acts of devotion, the meaning of which has been entirely forgotten during the process of transmission from antiquity. Instead of this ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... it," said Levin without thinking, and he was conscious immediately that he had said what he did not think. He felt that if he admitted that, it would be proved that he had been talking meaningless rubbish. How it would be proved he could not tell, but he knew that this would inevitably be logically proved to him, and ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... another example of this rather fundamental tendency of the stupor reaction, not merely to diminish conative reactions in general, but to reduce their appearance to that of isolated, partial and therefore rather meaningless expression. ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... and which had become nearly a necessity of his existence. He could not live with an eternal critic; the prospect was totally inconceivable. He wanted love, and he wanted admiring love, and without it marriage was meaningless to him, a ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... Representatives or Palata Pretsaviteley (110 seats; members elected by universal adult suffrage to serve 4-year terms) election results: party affiliation data unavailable; under present political conditions party designations are meaningless elections: last held October 2000 (next to be held ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... the people, and the dark frowns of the baffled and exhausted Baal priests, as they gradually came out of their frenzy, and knew that they had lost their opportunity. The tranquil though earnest prayer of the prophet is in sharpest contrast with the meaningless bellowings to Baal. Note in it the solemn invocation. The great Name, which all listening to him had deposed from rule over them, is set in the front; and the ancestral worship, as well as the divine gifts and dealings with the patriarchs, is pleaded with God ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... a silly word. In a natural world there is no place for the supernatural.' He grew testy. 'Can I ever teach you, Helen, not to employ words utterly meaningless?' ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... apprehend where I had judged wrongly. My mistake was that I had applied an answer to my question concerning life which only concerned my own life, to life in general. My life had been but one long indulgence of my passions. It was evil and meaningless. Therefore such an answer had no application to life at large, but only to ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... all by which it speaks to us more clearly than to brutes, upon all which bears witness to the intentions of the Supreme that we are to receive more from the covering vault than the light and the dew which we share with the weed and the worm, as only a succession of meaningless and monotonous accident, too common and too vain to be worthy of a moment of watchfulness, or a glance of admiration. If in our moments of utter idleness and insipidity, we turn to the sky as a last resource, which of its phenomena do we speak of? One says, ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... dialogue, a confused multitude of names, incomprehensible memoranda of incidents. Of the latter one has stuck in my memory. "Lancelot Sinlow seduces Guinevere the false 'Immaculata' and Jehovah steps in." Other sheets were covered with meaningless phrases, the crude drawings that the writing man makes mechanically while he is thinking over his work, and arabesques such as we ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... gardens of the Tuileries, affords a most excellent idea of that stately style, as developed in France under Franois I. The whole of this splendid plan, however, has been rendered futile by the destruction of the Tuileries, without which the enclosure becomes wholly meaningless. ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... the formula that defines the law of each individual life. All this is not intended to mean that we have each named a clear and definite ideal which is our chosen goal. On the contrary, such a conception may be almost meaningless to some of us. In general the higher the ideal the vaguer and less vivid is its presentation to our consciousness. But, named or unnamed, sharp or blurred, vivid or half-forgotten, there may be found in the heart of every man that which of all things he wants to ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... embargo was laid upon the Customs funds. The Northern troops, raised and trained by Yuan Shih-kai, when he was Viceroy of the Metropolitan province, were, it is true, proving themselves the masters of the Yangtsze and South China troops; yet that circumstance was meaningless. Those troops were fighting for what had already proved itself a lost cause—the Peking System as well as the Manchu dynasty. The fight turned more and more into a money-fight. It was foreign money which brought about the first ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... her? She had fallen back in her chair and was still staring with parted lips at the dark pane that a minute ago had framed the horrid countenance. When at last she spoke, her words were wild and meaningless, with a dreadful mockery of laughter that sent a swift pang of apprehension to ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... come, and Danvers, unfamiliar with death, knew no words of consolation for the father bereft of his firstborn. A numbness mercifully comes during those first hours, which makes it possible to move about and go through strange, meaningless ceremonies with a calm that surprises those who have not known the searing ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... gazing into his cabinet, fathoms deep in thought. That Miss Heth was responsible for a meaningless lie which took away more than life itself from one who had loved her truly in his way: this was a hypothesis so wild and weak that it collapsed at the first opportunity for calm, just examination. The sight of her again, the other night, had merely clinched the matter; driven by a glance the ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... all vague, meaningless, incomprehensible to Ranny. He only remembered afterward, long afterward, that on that night when he had spoken of Mercier she ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... meaningless words have always been the favorite components of verbal charms, whose power, in the opinion of medieval conjurers, was in direct ratio to their obscurity;[38:3] and this fact is well shown in ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... twenty-one years and seven months. He was by no means a handsome man—perhaps the reverse. The contour of his face was somewhat angular and harsh. His forehead was lofty and very fair; his nose a snub; his eyes large, heavy, glassy, and meaningless. About the mouth there was more to be observed. The lips were gently protruded, and rested the one upon the other, after such a fashion that it is impossible to conceive any, even the most complex, combination ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... and satellites of Sol had proven comparatively tractable and those that were suited to man-life were quickly brought under his dominion. But there, of course, he had the advantage of proximity. The time involved in running back and forth to the home planet was meaningless and all Earth's resources could be thrown ...
— Adaptation • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... retained, his Johannes Agricola of 1836, Pictor Ignotus of 1845, and Rudel of 1842. Later criticism, moreover, that even yet assumes to ring the old changes of discrimination against everything but "Men and Women," is made not merely inapplicable by this re-arrangement, but uninformed, a meaningless echo of a borrowed opinion which has had the very ground from ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... "that the Nawab would tell you, though the ass goes to Mecca he becomes not a pilgrim thereby. But Atma Singh, if I mistake not, your own creed does not recognize the rites we are to witness; I ask, then, in my turn, why, since our mission is meaningless, does your choice of a destination lead us to the most distant ...
— Atma - A Romance • Caroline Augusta Frazer
... he talked very well. Charnock had a keen eye for the ridiculous and a pretty wit, and was no longer handicapped by the fear of being dismissed. While the foreman replied with coarse but rather meaningless abuse, Charnock's retorts had a definite aim and hit their mark. He indicated with humorous skill the defects in his antagonist's looks and character, and Festing's gang laughed uproariously, while the borrowed workmen applauded as loudly as they ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... his brow, and his hands were clinched. He was apparently furious with passion, but in reality he was perfectly self-possessed. The best proof that can be given of his coolness is that he was carefully studying M. Fortunat's face, and trying to discover the agent's real intentions under his meaningless words. He had expected to find "his dear extortioner" exasperated by his loss, cursing and swearing, and demanding his money—but not at all. He found him more gentle and calm, colder and more reserved than ever; brimful of resignation indeed, and preaching submission to the ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... loosened his hold on the younger man's shoulder and began hopping forward, and the light threw huge, grotesque, strangely moving shadows on the wall ahead of them. Dick ran after him, crowding on his heels and shouting meaningless hopes. Abruptly they came to a right-angle drift, and then, but a few yards down it, they discovered an upraise, crude and uncared-for, but climbing into the higher darkness, and down this there ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... Miami slave and apparently unhurt. But as I stood over her a line of foam bubbled out of her blue lips. Her eyes were meaningless. I had frightened her into catalepsy, and I ground my teeth at my ill luck, for she could have told me something of the woman. I took my brandy flask and tried to ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... looked at her wonderingly. It was a new experience to hear life reduced to the simple terms Phil used. She seemed to him like a teacher who keeps a dull pupil after class, and, by eliminating all unessential factors, makes clear what an hour before had been only a jumble of meaningless terms in the ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... effective as I imagined, and could not account for it; I was staring [with surprise] when he rolled on the ground, and assuming the appearance of a tennis ball, he flew up to the sky. He ascended so high, that at last he disappeared; a moment after, flashing like lightning, and vociferating some meaningless words in his rage, he descended, and gave me such a kick, that I swooned away, and fell flat on my back, and became as one lifeless. God knows how long I remained ere I came to my senses; but when I opened my eyes I saw that I was lying in such a wilderness, where, except thorns and briars, nothing ...
— Bagh O Bahar, Or Tales of the Four Darweshes • Mir Amman of Dihli
... Death but a tale Told to faces grown pale, Worn and wasted with years— A meaningless thing to ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... 28, 1911:—He remains in same apparent stuporous and catatonic attitude. For past few days has exhibited various childish and silly acts of a meaningless and monotonous nature. Still mute except for an occasional growl. Became very untidy today, but when reprimanded and told he must use ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... dots, strove to read a meaning into them. The Hollow Needle! What a bewildering conjunction of two simple words! What an incomprehensible question was set by that scrap of paper, whose very origin and manufacture were unknown! The Hollow Needle! Was it a meaningless expression, the puzzle of a schoolboy scribbling with pen and ink on the corner of a page? Or were they two magic words which could compel the whole great adventure of Lupin the great adventurer to assume its true ...
— The Hollow Needle • Maurice Leblanc
... it she was slowly becoming inured; but the strangeness of her life she could not yet comprehend—its meaningless days and nights, its dragging hours—and the strange people around her immersed in their sordid pleasures—this woman—her husband's sister, thin-lipped, hard-featured, drinking, smoking, gambling, shrill in disputes, merciless of speech, venomously ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... chair, overcome by a strange weakness. The clock struck ten—it was only ten o'clock! Suddenly she remembered that she had not ordered dinner...or were they dining out that evening? Dinner—dining out—the old meaningless phraseology pursued her! She must try to think of herself as she would think of some one else, a some one dissociated from all the familiar routine of the past, whose wants and habits must gradually be learned, as one might spy out the ways of ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... assimilate its spirit. There can be no worthy or adequate rendering of a great poem or prose selection without a keen appreciation of its inner meaning and content. This is the principal safeguard against mechanical and meaningless declamation. The extent of this appreciation and grasp of the inherent spirit of thought will largely determine the degree of life, reality, and impressiveness imparted to ...
— Talks on Talking • Grenville Kleiser
... have some clear reason to the contrary, avoid the use of expressions that have been used so much that they are worn out and often almost meaningless. Such expressions as the following ones are not wrong, but are often used when they ...
— Practical Grammar and Composition • Thomas Wood
... have dignified her most frequent occupation by the title of profession. With a thin blue scarf turbaned round her head in floating ends, and with scanty and clinging array otherwise, tossing a tambourine, and singing wild, meaningless songs, she used to whirl and spring on the grass-plot of an evening, the young masters and mistresses smiling and applauding from the verandah, while the wind-blown flame of a flaring pitch-pine knot, held by little Pluto, gave her strange careering ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... for a saying sufficiently orotund and meaningless to content his ethics, and to be hailed with convenience as a great moral principle, the eagle forgot all about Count Manuel: but the stork did not forget, because in the eyes of the stork the life ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... term of disgust used to describe a program. The connotation in this case is that the program works as designed, but the design is bad. Said, for example, of a program that generates large numbers of meaningless error messages, implying that it is on the brink of imminent collapse. ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... over Lady Charlotte drove her flocks, of much the same pattern, like billows before a piping gale. They might be similar—a puffed iteration, and might be meaningless and wearisome; the gale was a power ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... even in the most rudimentary degree, a beginning is made with us that is designed to carry us far, if we but follow the leading of our hearts. There is an ideal toward which all our experience points. If it were not so, life would be a hopeless enigma, and the world a meaningless farce. There must be a spiritual function intended, a design to build up strong and true moral character, to develop sweet and holy life, otherwise history is a despair, and experience a hopeless riddle. All truly great human life has been lived with a spiritual outlook, and on a high ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... for pension on the shelf of General Duty is an object at once pitiful and ludicrous. His profession has ebbed away from him, and he lies a melancholy derelict on the shore, with sails flapping idly against the mast and meaningless ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... fond of quoting ballads. He gives a form of the first verse in Otterburn which is common to Herd and the English copy. He says that, according to some, Douglas was treacherously slain by one of his own men whom he had offended. "But this narration is not so probable," and the fact is fairly meaningless in Herd's fragment (the boy has no motive for stabbing Douglas, for if his report is true, he will be rewarded). The deed is probably based on the tradition which Godscroft thought "less probable,"—the treacherous murder of ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... the assaults of their opponents, but because of their impotence in the face of a grave national crisis. Nevertheless, they were on all essential issues beaten by the Democrats; and on the few occasions on which they were victorious, their victories were both meaningless and fruitless. ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... was the testy interruption; "but the world is not so easily led in matters of religion. The message, as you say, is divine; but it may sound like meaningless twaddle to the world at large. If we are to heal mankind and dispel the heresy of disease and death, why can't Holiest Mother save herself? Mind you, I am looking at this thing with ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... Romish Church, is, to vast numbers, a dead language,—an unknown tongue. There are hundreds of words and phrases used by preachers and religious writers which neither they nor their hearers or readers understand. In some of them there is nothing to be understood. They are mere words; meaningless sounds. Some of them have meanings, but they are hard to come at, and when you have got at them you find them to be worse than none. They are falsehoods that lurk within the dark and antiquated words. I have heard and even read whole sermons in which nine sentences out of ten had no more meaning ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... not read, or the illegible, meaningless ink scrawl upon the sheet within the boldly-addressed envelope would have aroused his suspicions at the outset. So well had Bough, that expert in human frailty, understood his subject, that the letter was a bogus letter, a fraud, not elaborate—a mere stage property, nothing ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... justifies the use of analogy in matters of religion, and is of great importance. One might almost dare to say that all conclusions about the world above us which are not based on the analogy of our own mental experiences, are either false or meaningless. ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... confess I believed that I had lived for that smile six years, and suffered a bad noise for the sound of your voice. It seemed but a minute until we found ourselves almost alone with the solid women at the ices. One swift phrase from you, and we had slipped back through the meaningless years till we stood there in the parlor at Grant Street, mere boy and girl. The babbling room vanished for a few golden moments. Then you rustled off, and I believe I told Mrs. Goodrich that musicales were very nice, for they gave you a chance to talk. And I went to the dressing-room, wondering ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... reading about them too, Lucilla; as I like reading other grand poetry. But, surely, we ought both to do more than like it? Will God be satisfied with us, think you, if we read His words, merely for the sake of an entirely meaningless poetical sensation? ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... had been eaten, the last drop of water nearly exhausted. The strongest might endure for a day or two, the weakest ones must sink within a few hours. Even O'Carroll, strong as he seemed, was giving way. He sat dull and unconscious, his eyes meaningless, only arousing himself by a great effort. My brother's head rested on my arm, and I was moistening his lips with the few drops obtained from the cask. Suddenly Kelson, who had been gazing round the horizon, started up, crying out, "A ...
— James Braithwaite, the Supercargo - The Story of his Adventures Ashore and Afloat • W.H.G. Kingston
... personage drive up in a magnificent carriage. A dread foreboding seized him. Dull stupefaction, and thoughts scurrying like mice, vague terror, and the numbness of expectation and the weight of crushed tears in his heavy-laden breast, on his lips the forced, empty smile, and a meaningless prayer—addressed ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... think, however, that these persons are commonly fools. I have known a number, and all of them were intelligent. I think nothing conveys the idea of UNDERBREEDING more than this self-betraying smile. Yet I think this peculiar habit as well as that of MEANINGLESS BLUSHING may be fallen into by very good people who met often, or sit opposite each other at table. A true gentleman's face is infinitely removed from all such paltriness,—calm-eyed, firm-mouthed. I think Titian understood the look of a gentleman as well as anybody that ever lived. The portrait ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the two separate averments in the second chapter of Genesis, both entirely meaningless apart from the construction we here give it, that "out of the ground made the Lord God to grow" the vegetation of the earth, and "out of the ground" produced he (or caused to be produced) every beast of the field, etc.,—all of which has a definite and comprehensive significance ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... had a delicate constitution, and in his case "hard labour" was a meaningless sentence, and imprisonment was no punishment to him whatever. To have made it more severe would have been all the same to him, as the hospital would then have been his perpetual abode. Some prisoners were in hospital nearly the whole of their sentence. One prisoner lay ...
— Six Years in the Prisons of England • A Merchant - Anonymous
... dreadful sufferings of mankind. We have inherited Christianity without Christ; we have the painted shell of a religion, and that which rattles around within it is not the burning soul of the Great Iconoclast, but a cold and shriveled and meaningless tradition. Oh! for the quick-pulsing, warm-beating, mighty human heart of the man of Galilee! Oh! for his uplifted hand, armed with a whip of scorpions, to depopulate the temples of the world, and lash his recreant preachers into ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... Greece the adjectival clan-name early disappeared, it became, among the Italians generally and not merely among the Romans, the principal name; and the distinctive individual name, the -praenomen-, became subordinate. It seems as if the small and ever diminishing number and the meaningless character of the Italian, and particularly of the Roman, individual names, compared with the luxuriant and poetical fulness of those of the Greeks, were intended to illustrate the truth that it was ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... perfectly possible for a strong and handy man, accustomed to agricultural pursuits, to earn a living from the soil, my example has little to teach in this direction. The cry of 'Back to the Land' will be meaningless until general ownership in the land is made possible. It is the burden of rent, often a cruel and unjust rent, that has driven men from the land. Not far from me at Thornthwaite there resided a man and his wife who were among the most frugal and industrious persons ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... all profane did not trouble Ann in the least. It was a meaningless trick of speech. Markham meant no more at this time by his most shocking oaths than does any man by his habitual expletive. Ann knew this perfectly. ...
— The Zeit-Geist • Lily Dougall
... win many a grateful smile from anxious mothers, by capturing and picking up little toddlers who would persist in running about and falling down right in the way of hurrying passengers. He also kept an eye on the old ladies, who were so flustered and bewildered, and asked such meaningless questions of everybody, that he wondered how they were ever to reach ...
— Cab and Caboose - The Story of a Railroad Boy • Kirk Munroe
... the code. Then these detached and meaningless words took on a significance which she could not afford ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... cease within this generation or the next to be an affair of the most baffling mystery to our town folk. Me, also, it amazed; though my emotion was chiefly concerned with those gracious effects which the gods continued to manage from that apparently meaningless sojourn of J. ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... five minutes after, LeBlanc and Green breezed by, not letting any grass grow under their feet. I've marked the spot well, and have located a good trail all the way, using private signs of our own that would be meaningless even to a woodsman familiar with all trail markings and signs. Fact I discovered one or two unfamiliar trail signs, that I could not recognize, and I believe they are the ones put there by a smuggler band. I'm ...
— The Ranger Boys and the Border Smugglers • Claude A. Labelle
... qualities, that the world was delighted with them. After him, however, the lowered aim had its influence; poorer artists tried to follow in his footsteps, and the world of art soon became flooded with mediocre examples of these meaningless pictures. All this hastened rapidly the decay of ...
— Barbara's Heritage - Young Americans Among the Old Italian Masters • Deristhe L. Hoyt
... night. During all this time he seemed cheerful, and spoke quite lucidly on various topics. In particular, he exhibited to his colleague a curious strip of what looked like ancient papyrus, on which were traced certain grotesque and apparently meaningless figures. This, he said, he had found some days before on the bed of a poor woman in one of the horribly low quarters that surround Berlin, on whom he had had occasion to make a post-mortem examination. The woman had suffered from partial paralysis. She had a small young family, none of whom, ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... of nothing on earth which is so totally lacking in expression as an egg. The great desert Sphinx, brooding through its veil of sand, has not that tremendous and meaningless dignity which wraps the colorless oval effort ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... Brahma. We must not shrink to avow this. Our existence is meaningless if we never can expect to realise the highest perfection that there is. If we have an aim and yet can never reach it, then it is no ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore
... that use these hymns the child is frequently not in the Sunday services; he is in the children's service or the school, while in the majority of churches a weak-minded endeavor for amusement has substituted meaningless rag-time trivialities for rich and dignified hymns. Perhaps the custom of encouraging congregations to jig, dance, cavort, or drone through the frivolities of "popular" gospel songs is only a passing craze, but it is a most unfortunate one; it tends to divorce worship ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... question had fallen upon deaf ears. The car had stopped before the entrance to the theatre. She stepped out even before he could assist her, hurried across the pavement and looked back at him for one moment only before she plunged into the dark passage. She nodded, and there was an utterly meaningless ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... 'ticking-over props' for us to pass, the different-colored lights which were being fired down from machines already in the air and the lights fired up from the ground, all combined and whirled through my excited brain like a meaningless nightmare. Then there was a deafening roar and we shot down a path of light, bumped hard, bumped less hard, bumped again, and the huge plane with its great load of bombs was in the air. Lights on the ground and the lights of machines in the air ...
— Night Bombing with the Bedouins • Robert Henry Reece
... listening, but the tic-toc seemed to fit the syllables of his name; and when, annoyed, she made a half disdainful mental attempt to substitute other syllables, it proved too much of an effort, and back into its sober, swinging rhythm slipped the old clock's tic-toe, in wearisome, meaningless repetition: ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... that he gets as much money that's due him as possible, when you get to Gram. And ask Duke Angus, as a favor to give him some meaningless position with a suitably impressive title, Lord Chamberlain of the Ducal Washroom, or something. Then he can prime him with misinformation and give him an opportunity to sell it to Omfray of Glaspyth. Then, ...
— Space Viking • Henry Beam Piper
... displacing the organs of her body, unfitting her to be a mother, causing more than half the surgical operations in the hospitals. She will then discuss character more than fashion. She will be ashamed of her silly, giggling and meaningless conversation. God said, "a man shall not wear that which pertains to a woman neither shall a woman put on a mans garment for all that do such things are an abomination unto God" women will then see the vulgarity and immodesty and sin in dressing in male attire or in any other ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation
... smile, which could maintain a long, but somewhat meaningless, brilliance. She employed it now, and it lasted until ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... able to come to an agreement as to what portion of the papers should be published, although both Governments have long since promised publication. The words used in the House of Commons by Sir Edward Grey were altered by the French Government into meaningless words, and the words actually used excluded by Governmental action from every ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... about him; religio, the sense of awe and of dependence, must have been constantly with him. But even here we may see, I think, a possible germ of religious development; for without this feeling of awe religious forms tend to become meaningless: lull religio to sleep, and the forms cease to represent effectively man's experience of life. We have to see later on how this paralysis of the religious instinct did actually take ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... of tea manufacture, of the repeated, meaningless, tossing back and forth and Chinese juggling with the abused tea leaves, are but too familiar to students of the subject: and too disappointing also, when we are moved to ask—Why all this manipulation? What is the nature of the chemical ...
— Tea Leaves • Francis Leggett & Co.
... look upon all by which it speaks to us more clearly than to brutes, upon all which bears witness to the intention of the Supreme, that we are to receive more from the covering vault than the light and the dew which we share with the weed and the worm, only as a succession of meaningless and monotonous accidents too common and too vain to be worthy of a moment of watchfulness, or a glance of admiration. If in our moments of utter idleness and insipidity, we turn to the sky as a last resource, which of its phenomena ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... of them, give me the impression of being copied by very unintelligent scribes, who had but little idea of the meaning of the words which they were transcribing. In all, the superscription V.S. is expanded (wrongly, as I believe) into 'Viro Senatori;' for 'Praefecto Praetorio' we have the meaningless 'Praeposito;' and the Agapitus who is addressed in the 6th, 32nd, and 33rd letters of the First Book is turned, in defiance of chronology, into ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... way that the adult wins the battle of religious education. In the deeper and more far-seeing sense he has lost it. Religion has become, not a charming privilege, but a lesson, a lesson about unbelievable things, a meaningless task to be learnt by heart, a drudgery. It may be said that even if that is so, religious lessons merely share the inevitable fate of all subjects which become school tasks. But that is not the case. Every other subject which is likely to become a school task is apt to become intelligible and ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... discourse; but owing to the fact that Robbie's blow had fallen about the blacksmith's eyes, and that those organs had since become sensibly eclipsed by a prodigious and discolored swelling, what was meant for a withering glance looked more like a meaningless grin. At this apparent levity under her many distresses, Liza's wrath rose to boiling point, and she burst out upon Mr. Joseph with more of the home-spun of the country-side than ever fell from ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... many people, both men and women, married and single, say that without children marriage is meaningless, in which opinion I heartily concur. More than one young woman dowered with generous blood, vitality, and courage has confided in me that whether she should marry or not she wished to be a mother at all costs. It is one of the disastrous results of men's shrinking from matrimony that fine ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... was that Mrs. Hopkins saw herself as others saw her. She ceased making these empty and meaningless apologies, and became a wiser and better woman. The next time Superintendent Robson went to the Squire's he found a "house fit for him to stay in and things fit ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... Chandler, being a Greenbacker on principle, was a regularly elected delegate and by courtesy was added to a sub-committee on resolutions. The one prepared by the National Association was placed in her hands, but, as she was forbidden to speak upon it, her support could only be given by vote, and a meaningless substitute took its place. The courtesy of placing Mrs. Chandler upon the committee was like much of man's boasted chivalry to woman, a seeming favor at ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... center right there—focus there, as at a point. Let kings and emperors continue to strut and mouth vain phrases; let our own President and Congress make the motions of governing; even let Wall Street play at finance and power. All, all are empty and meaningless! ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... away into meaningless words, and the light left his face. He moved in Robin's arms and sighed. Then, as his body rolled slowly over, and he lay with his back turned to them, they saw that his worst wound was in it—a dastard's blow. So ended the life of Will o' th' Green—or Will ...
— Robin Hood • Paul Creswick
... contain archaic expressions, for which the shaman can assign a meaning, but whose etymology cannot now be learned; and some embody obsolete words whose meaning is lost even to the priesthood. There are many vocables known to be meaningless and recited merely to fill out the rhythm or to give a dignified length to the song. For the same reasons a meaningless syllable is often added ...
— The Mountain Chant, A Navajo Ceremony • Washington Matthews
... and yet..." She lowered her head and began to trace a meaningless pattern on the cloth before she resumed. "You've given me to understand I'm responsible for your sudden awakening, that it's because of a regard conceived for me you're so anxious to become an honest man. Suppose ... suppose you were to find out ... ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... formula that defines the law of each individual life. All this is not intended to mean that we have each named a clear and definite ideal which is our chosen goal. On the contrary, such a conception may be almost meaningless to some of us. In general the higher the ideal the vaguer and less vivid is its presentation to our consciousness. But, named or unnamed, sharp or blurred, vivid or half-forgotten, there may be found in the heart of every man that which of all things he wants to be, that which of all deeds ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... practise quick additions, subtractions, multiplications and divisions, in pure arithmetical form, if the pretence purpose is clearly in view, which to them is a real purpose; the same thing occurs in writing which should be considered a side issue of reading; meaningless words or sentences are written wearily and without pains, but to write the name of a picture you have painted, at the bottom of it, or to write something that Cinderella's Godmother said, or bit by bit to write a letter, will ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... an audience resents having its time wasted by a long, floundering, meaningless preamble, and it is sure to get even. Next time it will come late to avoid that preliminary "catch as catch can" performance or—it will ...
— The Art of Lecturing - Revised Edition • Arthur M. (Arthur Morrow) Lewis
... achieve it. Our life is simple and innocent. We are untouched by ambition, and what pride we have is due only to our contemplation of the work of our hands. Malice cannot touch us, nor envy attack. Ah, <i mon cher monsieur>, they talk of the blessedness of labour, and it is a meaningless phrase, but to me it has the most intense significance. ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... and so it went on, constantly increasing, till it reached in our day the logical climax of the dogmas of transubstantiation and the infallibility of the Pope, or of the bishops, or of Scripture, and of requiring a blind faith rendered incomprehensible and utterly meaningless, not in God, but in Christ, not in a doctrine, but in a person, as in Catholicism, or in persons, as in Greek Orthodoxy, or in a book, as in Protestantism. The more widely Christianity was diffused, and ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... The alleged destruction of memories by an injury to the brain is but a break in the continuous progress by which they actualize themselves."[Footnote: Matter and Memory, p. 160 (Fr. p. 134).] It is then futile to ask in what spot past memories are stored. To look for them in any place would be as meaningless as asking to see traces of the telephonic message upon ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... committed. One would rather have thought that a man had better be damned a thousand times over than allow of such a catastrophe; but, however this may be, the doctrine now suggested appears to be equally revolting, unless diluted so far as to be meaningless. It amounts to asserting that our love of our own infinitesimal individuality is so powerful that any matter in which we are personally concerned has a weight altogether incommensurable with that of any matter in which we have no concern. People who ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... on regular opium debauches sometimes. In this case perhaps it is very fortunate for some one that he was imprudent enough to take such heavy doses of the drug that the policeman picked him up, for a lot of papers were found on him. They are meaningless to me, but perhaps you can throw some ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... said, and, though the remark was meaningless, one might have thought, from Calypso's face—in which rose colour fought with a suggestion of submerged ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... and although I could not make out the expressions of their faces, in the gloom, yet I doubted not but that they were puzzled ones at that lengthy and apparently meaningless harangue. ...
— The Suitors of Yvonne • Raphael Sabatini
... grew before his fixed eyes, then quickly, so that at the last there was a complete picture where but an instant before had been but a meaningless mass of line and colour. Set on a hill were many low, square, flat-topped houses, brown in colour against the gray ground about them. In front of these houses was a larger structure of the same material, a church-like ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... interpenetrative, which the critical and inquisitive genius of the Renaissance opened for investigation. In the former of these regions we find two agencies at work—art and scholarship. During the Middle Ages the plastic arts, like philosophy, had degenerated into barren and meaningless scholasticism—a frigid reproduction of lifeless forms copied technically and without inspiration from debased patterns. Pictures became symbolically connected with the religious feelings of the people, formulas from ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... the first line of the lead on meaningless generalities. Get down to the facts at once. For instance, "The presence of mind and bravery of Fireman David Mullen saved Mrs. Daniel Looker from being burned to death in her flat, etc." We are willing to grant ...
— Newspaper Reporting and Correspondence - A Manual for Reporters, Correspondents, and Students of - Newspaper Writing • Grant Milnor Hyde
... cork, and haggard hair, gives him a truly awful aspect, remarked that the soil of the South was clotted with blood by fiends in human shape, (sensation in the diplomatic gallery.) The metaphor might be meaningless; but it struck him it was strong. These fiends were doubly protected by midnight and the mask. In his own State the Ku-Klux ranged together with the fierce whang-doodle. His own life had been threatened. (Faint applause.) He had received an express ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 2, April 9, 1870 • Various
... propositions for the discovery of fresh truth. Many pages of the Social Contract are mere logical deductions from verbal definitions: the slightest attempt to confront them with actual fact would have shown them to be not only valueless, but wholly meaningless, in connection with real human nature and the visible working of human affairs. He looks into the word, or into his own verbal notion, and tells us what is to be found in that, whereas we need to be told the marks ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... half-blown roses just bursting their sheaths in a glossy covert of amber tresses; and wondering that a coiffure with such poetic taste could have existed unknown in Brittany. As the marchioness stood, dropping sweet, meaningless words from her dewy lips, Bertha's hand was claimed by the Duke de Montauban, and she was led ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... terrible thing to have him tell you there was no longer any kick in your kisses. So I remain on my dignity. I am companionable, and nothing more. When we were saying good-by, the last time he went off to the city, and he looked up at my perfunctory and quite meaningless peck on his cheek, I felt myself blushing before his quiet and half-quizzical stare. Then he laughed a little as he turned away and pulled on his gauntlets. "The sweeter the champagne, I suppose, the colder it should ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... moment that they approach the monstrous or the terrible. An altogether vulgar and insignificant man will begin to please us the moment that a violent passion, which indeed in no way upraises his personal value, makes him an object of fear and terror, in the same way that a vulgar, meaningless object becomes to us the source of aesthetic pleasure the instant we have enlarged it to the point where it threatens to overstep our comprehension. An ugly man is made still more ugly by passion, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... bar; otherwise a hopeless confusion of the measure will ensue. Precision in this matter is the more requisite, because of the peculiarity in the measure. If the first step in each bar be not strongly marked, the valse measure has no chance of making itself apparent; and the dance becomes a meaningless galop. ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge
... jealousy was too importunate, and he resolved to make any effort to keep her for himself alone. He knew she had love for him, but he knew that love would not necessarily, or even probably, keep her entirely faithful to him. She thought too little of passing intrigues. To her they seemed trifles, meaningless, unimportant. She told him so, when he spoke his jealousy. She said, 'I love you. I do not love these other men. They are in my ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... in his sleep, feeling nothing, fearing nothing,—no, thou mighty Unknown, I do not fear! But then I hope nothing: I believe nothing. Those pleasant dreams of yours—God, Heaven, Immortality—are to me meaningless words. At times I utter them, and they seem to shine down like pitiless stars upon the black boiling sea in which ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... love to make them. We of riper years are inclined to forget how very strong was our pictorial instinct when we were young. A little girl may make on a sheet of paper a few irregular lines not very well connected, wholly meaningless to us, and see in them very plainly every lineament of her favorite doll. She sees no lines, no paper, only her own precious doll. A little later she will draw pictures to illustrate a story, and while we may see nothing in her work, she sees enough ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... I would return and find you again; I could not depart from France without finding and thanking you for all your kindness. In truth I am glad you came, for——." I tried to say more, but the words left my lips sounding so cold and meaningless the sentence ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... How did she know that? No woman on earth loved him as she did? What if he should show her the contrary? He must no longer love, only permit himself to be loved! This advice did not displease him. In fact perhaps it was sensible to direct a wild life full of adventures which, in reality, were meaningless, monotonous, and profoundly unsatisfying, into the channels of a regulation domestic existence. But if he himself decided to bring it to a close, it should not be the end which Else wished ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... exaggerated phrases are frittered into commonplaces, and the most impassioned words grow meaningless, what can a Spanish gentleman find to say when his heart is really touched?" ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... swamps, lagoons, terraces, meaningless rises and indentations of the ground, and two great brown grassy mountains on either side, are the principal and uninteresting objects in the valley through which we were riding. I despair of giving you an impression of the real thing. It is so ...
— A First Year in Canterbury Settlement • Samuel Butler
... difficult undertaking. The shepherds had been dispersed, but the flock refused to forsake the fold. From the nourishing food they had discovered in the Word of God, they could not be induced to return to the husks offered to them in meaningless ceremonies, celebrated in an unknown tongue by men of impure lives. The Gospels in French remained more attractive than the legendary, even after the bishop had abandoned the championship of the incipient reformation. Briconnet's ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... and in the things we laugh at; but clearest of all in dreams. I say the meaning is clear to the initiated because it does require special training and experience to analyze these seemingly nonsensical slips of tongue and pen, these highly elaborated and apparently meaningless dreams, into the wishes (instinct and habit impulses) which gave them birth. It is fortunate for us that we are protected in this way from having to face openly many of our own wishes and the wishes ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... class-room they had selected was in a remote part of the building, there was little immediate chance of detection. So the laughter of the party grew louder and sillier; the talk more foolish and random; the merriment more noisy and meaningless. But still most of them mingled some sense of caution with their enjoyment, and warned Eric and Wildney more than once that they must look out, and not take too much that night for fear of being caught. But it was Wildney's birth-day, ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... three charming pictures deserve to be better hung. The Stetson group illustrates the Impressionist method and result as well as anything in the Palace. Take his "Smugglers" or his "Summer Joy" (3311, 3317), and note how a few heavy and apparently meaningless dabs of color may be laid side by side on canvas in such a way that, when seen from a distance, they blend, until the picture not only outlines figures and foliage, but also glows with atmosphere, ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... purely social invitations from white persons. He always claimed that he could best satisfy his social desires among his own people. He believed that the question of so-called "social equality" between the races was too academic and meaningless to be worthy of ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... outset, discarded the traditional notion of a political Messiah, and recognized the truth that the happiness of a people lies not so much in political autonomy as in the love of God and the sincere practice of righteousness. The people were to be freed from the bondage of sin, of meaningless formalism, of consecrated hypocrisy,—a bondage more degrading than the payment of tribute to the emperor. The true business of the Messiah, then, was to deliver his people from the former bondage; it might be left to Jehovah, in his own good time, to deliver ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... did not answer. She was staring at the fateful telegram, reading it over and over again; the words now meaningless to her. But she had grasped their import with the first swift glance. Jack was ...
— The Motor Girls on Waters Blue - Or The Strange Cruise of The Tartar • Margaret Penrose
... inkling before. Sent him away with the notes of a melody floating through his brain, so that the merry laugh of his children will be a discord, and such a memory of a soft glance, that his wife's bright look will be meaningless.' ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... message been a false one," continued the Commissioner, "the matter would have been resolved into a meaningless hoax, but the message having been what it was, we find ourselves face to face with no ordinary problem. Remember, Inspector, that voices on the telephone are deceptive. Sergeant Sowerby ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... done little except respond to meaningless introductions all the evening, and nothing could have pleased him less at the moment. But, somewhat awkwardly, he began to edge his way through the press in the wake of his hostess. The next moment he halted and stood ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... her smouldering jealousy of Honor, and gave the lie to her amazing instant of revelation. But once during the meal she encountered her husband's eyes. It was as if he had put out a hand and touched her; and her partner's veiled love-making became a meaningless murmur at her ear. Yet the surface of her brain travelled mechanically along the beaten track of dinner-table talk: and Garth, finding her gentler and more serious than her wont, deemed his hour ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... and merry, and do their duty as faithfully as any Christian, yet to them Heaven and Hell are meaningless abstractions; God and the soul are problems they, with quiet cheerfulness, leave time ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... looked at her he could not but perceive—that a certain amount of social energy seemed to enliven Lady Dumbello when he approached her. She was given to smile when addressed, but her usual smile was meaningless, almost leaden, and never in any degree flattering to the person to whom it was accorded. Very many women smile as they answer the words which are spoken to them, and most who do so flatter by their smile. The thing is so common that no one thinks of it. The flattering pleases, ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... on Alderton's headstone is an ornament, apparently palms. It is not unusual to find such meaningless, or apparently meaningless, designs employed to fill in otherwise blank spaces, though symbols of death, eternity, and the future state are in plentiful command for such purposes. Something like this same ornament may be found on a very old flat stone ...
— In Search Of Gravestones Old And Curious • W.T. (William Thomas) Vincent
... over the meaningless code words when he took his seat in the second of the two buckboards with Frisbie. The first assistant waited until the horses had splashed through the shallows of the river crossing; waited further until ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... man. He felt it so; and to leave his ordinary scenes and occupations and lose a morning with little Fleda was a freshening of his better nature; it was like breathing pure air after the fever heat of a sick room; it was like hearing the birds sing after the meaningless jabber of Bedlam. Mr. Carleton indeed did not put the matter quite so strongly to himself. He called Fleda his good angel. He did not exactly know that the office this good angel performed was simply ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... And with these apparently meaningless words he turned to the shaken Boyle and, taking his arm, began to walk him up and down in the ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... of those bridges from life-point to life- point, over which we must sometimes pass at a foot-pace! Is anything more intolerable than the monotonous tramp, tramp, of the meaningless steps? Is anything more sickening than the easy sway of the bridge, which seems to make the whole world reel, while in truth it is only ourselves? If Wych Hazel had been asked afterwards who was at Mrs. Powder's, and what was said, and ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... had driven his horses around the house to be fed and watered and rubbed down, and Mrs. Wrinkle, uttering a fusillade of meaningless ejaculations and puffs of gratified horror, had disappeared in the house to pack, old Jason made a wry face and squinted comically at Henley. "I reckon Het wasn't too much overcome to keep 'er from shufflin' 'er cards in her little poker game with you. You ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... shake themselves free from 'brute facts' in the past, to be at liberty to deny them as facts, while retaining them as representative ideas of faith. If reality is defined to consist only in life and action, it is a meaningless abstraction to snip off a moment in the process, and ask, 'Did it ever really take place?' This awkward question may therefore be ignored as meaningless and irrelevant, except from the 'abstract' standpoint ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... religious books. There is no doubt that such literature has a tremendous influence on many young people; but it has little influence on others, probably in part because the somewhat mystical style of most religious writings is meaningless to ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow
... home. Further back from the river, on the opposite shore, other houses could be seen; the houses of the heathen village; but Eleanor's eyes were fastened on this one. Mr. Rhys said not one word; only he held her hand in a still closer grasp which was not meaningless. ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume II • Susan Warner
... appropriate greeting. Some of them would be queer, no doubt; but at least they would be an improvement on the wearisome iteration of "Good-evening" and "Good-morning," and the monotonous inquiry, "How do you do?"—a question so meaningless that it seldom tarries for an answer. Under the new and more natural system of etiquette, when you passed the time of day with a man you would know his business, and the salutations of the market-place would be ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke
... routine labour, particularly in the home, as infra dignitatem and hence intolerable. Out of' that notion arise many lamentable phenomena. On the one hand, we have the spectacle of a great number of healthy and well-fed women engage in public activities that, nine times out of ten, are meaningless, mischievous and a nuisance, and on the other hand we behold such a decay in the domestic arts that, at the first onslaught of the late war, the national government had to import a foreign expert to teach the housewives of the country the veriest elements ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... disfigured features otherwise regular and always impressive. It had seriously injured his eyes, entirely destroying, it seems, the sight of one. He could not, it is said, distinguish a friend's face half a yard off, and pictures were to him meaningless patches, in which he could never see the resemblance to their objects. The statement is perhaps exaggerated; for he could see enough to condemn a portrait of himself. He expressed some annoyance when Reynolds had painted ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... once for all in the mind of a Creator, or gradually in the creation itself, which from the first monad or protoplasm to the last of the primates, or man, is not, I suppose, to be looked on as altogether causeless, meaningless, purposeless; think of him only as man (and man means the thinker), with his mind yet lying fallow, though full of germs—germs of which I hold as strongly as ever no trace has ever, no trace will ever, be discovered anywhere but in man; think of the Sun awakening the eyes of ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... interchange of wit, the society of the Townshends, the Walpoles, the Williamses, the Edgecumbes; all the jovial, keen wisdom of Gilly, and Dick, and Horace, and Charles, as they called one another, for the meaningless prattle, the merry laughter of this half-English, half-Italian child, It redeems Selwyn in our eyes, and it may have done him real good: nay, he must have felt a keen refreshment in this change from vice to innocence; and we understand the misery he expressed, when the old ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... to marry. Time hung heavy on my hands. The preparation of my book, Criminals I have Caught, kept me occupied for some months. When it was published, I had nothing more to do but think. I had plenty of money, and it was safely invested; there was no call for speculation. The future was meaningless to me; I regretted I had not elected to die in harness. As idle old men must, I lived in the past. I went over and over again my ancient exploits; I re-read my book. And as I thought and thought, away from the ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... custom, not at that day so prevalent in Russia as now, was still by no means unusual. And though Piotr and Alexei and old Masha, besides, as a matter of duty, his father, were the names on Ivan's written list, they were all of them meaningless compared with that one gift for her for whom no gift in the world could be sufficiently ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... face showed him that he had said enough. "I had not thought of this," she said, after a silence that seemed long to him. "Our observations are so meaningless until we are given the thread to string them on! You must think better of this, Lucian. The relation that at present exists between us is the very best that our different characters will admit of. Why do you ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... the scrub. A few minutes later, the flag returned, this time direct towards the sap-head, and now the Colonel, armed with German and Turkish vocabularies, was there to welcome it. They halted about twenty yards away, and a rather fruitless conversation followed. The Turks jabbered excitedly a meaningless chorus, to which the Colonel, full of importance and dignity, replied with deliberate and forceful phrases of alleged Turkish and German, fluttering the while through the vocabularies and prompted and admired on all sides by an audience of officers and men. ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... of saving time, different notions of what wastes time and what does not, and much which the old world regards as politeness and good manners Americans consider as sheer waste of time. Time is, they think, far too precious to be occupied with ceremonies which appear empty and meaningless. It can, they say, be much more profitably filled with other and more useful occupations. In any discussion of American manners it would be unfair to leave out of consideration their indifference to ceremony and their highly developed sense of the value of time, but in saying this I do not forget ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... anti-Socratic and discrediting analytical intellect, insists that whatever unity may be had must come through instinct, not analysis. He refuses to recognize Plato's One in the Many, sees the whole universe as "a perpetual gushing forth of novelties," a universal and meaningless flux. Surrender to this eternal flux, he appears to say, and then we shall gain reality. So he relies on impulse, instinct, his elan vital, which means, I take it, on man's subrational emotions. We call it Intuitionism, but such philosophy in plain and bitter English is the intellectual ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... correspondent's method? With a large air of virtuous impartiality he adopts 1886 for his starting-point all through his tables. It may be my denseness, but beyond meaningless uniformity, I can see absolutely nothing in this method to commend it. I see, however, that it is very useful for optimistic purposes. Did it not strike the reader that, in most industries, 1886 was a year of bad trade, and that therefore its ...
— Are we Ruined by the Germans? • Harold Cox
... rather she had controlled him; but it was no use any longer, for the time had come, and they abandoned themselves to the terrible voluptuousness of unrestrained grief, in which there is a strange meaningless suggestion of power, as though it might possibly be a force that could affect or remove its own cause if but wild ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 7 • Various
... was the solution of the industrial problem offered and enforced by Christianity working through secular life; it presupposed the small social and industrial unit and becomes meaningless if conceived in the gigantic and comprehensive scale of modern institutions. "National guilds" is a contradiction in terms: it takes on the same element of error that inheres in the idea of "one big union." In certain respects the Christian guild resembled the modern trade union, ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... in hand or a scrap of paper, and strides up to a high desk, where he stands the whole time, resting his elbows upon it and never once opening his eyes or looking his class in the face; the worst type of Jewish physiognomy in point of intellect, though without its cunning or sensuality; the face meaningless, pale, and sallow, with low forehead, and nothing striking but a pair of enormous black eyebrows. The figure is dressed in a dirty brown surtout, blue plush trousers, and dirty top-boots. It begins to speak. The voice ...
— Principal Cairns • John Cairns
... sitting near the fire and the four leaders ranged behind him, I stood and told my tale, cutting out all that was meaningless from their point of view. As I had expected, there was no mistaking its effect on him. I had indeed, come back empty-handed. Yet he pulled himself together and said lightly, "Well, gentlemen, if the men of the Midlands are not for me, they are ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... mountain a-hunting. He repeated the song which he had been singing, and the wind as it swirled about the house must have caught his voice and carried it far. It was a song chronicling the deeds of the Great Bear, and had a meaningless refrain, "Eeon-a, Ha-hoo-jah! Eeon-a, Ha-hoo-jah!" But when he reached the advent upon the scene of the secondary hero, the Great Bear himself, very polite, speaking excellent Cherokee ("since we are alone," ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... the threshold of a third and last season, and having put away her almost meaningless mourning, there had stolen into her sense of security something irksome in the promise she had made to give Quarrier a definite ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... turn to the mouth for a further indication of character. It was large, the lips were thick, but without a trace of sensuality. They were dim in colour, they were undefined in shape, they were a little meaningless—no, not meaningless, for they confirmed the psychological revelations of the receding temples. The hands were large, powerful, and grasping; they were earthly hands; they were hands that could take and could hold, and their materialism was curiously opposed ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... between the bayonets of their captors. They were a sturdy lot, this fresh "bag" from the hills, of a fine fighting age, and much less famished and war-worn than one could have wished. Their broad blond faces were meaningless, guarded, but neither defiant nor unhappy: they seemed none too sorry for ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
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