"Meaningless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... grievance, as they do. He professed total ignorance of the crime and the whole question; and showed nothing but a sullen impatience for something sensible that might come to take him out of his meaningless scrape. He asked me more than once if he could telephone for a lawyer who had helped him a long time ago in a trade dispute, and in every sense acted as you would expect an innocent man to act. There was nothing against him in the world except that little ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... 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, ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... addition to heroic psychological literature in the little work whose title we have given. For more than two years he has apparently spent a considerable time each day in committing to memory sets of meaningless syllables, and trying to trace numerically the laws according to which they were retained or forgotten. Most of his results, we are sorry to say, add nothing to our gross experience of the matter. Here, as in the case of the saints, heroism ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 508, September 26, 1885 • Various
... 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, and Eric's boyish mirth, suppressed by his recent troubles, ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... custom in their story-telling which I have never seen among any other people. One person recites the story, and the listeners break in, every now and then, with a laughing chorus that is nothing more than a repetition of the meaningless words, 'amna aya', which are sung over and over to any extent. The women generally enjoy it the most, and sing the loudest, especially when a man is concerned. I will give you a specimen of this kind of song,—translated, of course, as I have long ago forgotten ...
— Cast Away in the Cold - An Old Man's Story of a Young Man's Adventures, as Related by Captain John Hardy, Mariner • Isaac I. Hayes
... Homer, what is this? All your great heroes flung down upon the earth, shapeless, undistinguishable; mere meaningless dust; 'strengthless heads,' and no ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... as much as possible from the ignorant general public, and the alchemists themselves had knowledge of secret words and expressions which conveyed a definite meaning to one of their number, but which would appear a meaningless jumble to an outsider. Some of these writers declared openly that their writings were intended to convey an entirely erroneous impression, and were sent out only ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... however, for not one in the crowded room but was now thoroughly wonderstruck at the demonstration. Some of the older people began to step forward, writing the most difficult names they could think of, meaningless words, groups of figures. A teacher chalked a proposition in algebra. Without error ...
— The Young Railroaders - Tales of Adventure and Ingenuity • Francis Lovell Coombs
... my master these comparisons and the hopes I built upon them, they were swept away as meaningless; he pointed out simply that nothing went to prove a continuation of personality after death, while on the contrary everything argued against it,—and to this I ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... meaningless, incomprehensible to Ranny. He only remembered afterward, long afterward, that on that night when he had spoken of ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... it was meaningless. But as she read, a secondary thought rose in her mind. James was building this devilish-looking nightmare, and he had every intention of using it on her daughter! She accepted without understanding the fact that James Holden's superior education had come of such a machine—but it ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... with the husband, and done all that she could to recover the confidence of the wife, and then—looked out among the attractive young men of the neighborhood for another party to that sentimental, meaningless love-making, which was yet a necessity to her ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... them, and their graphic 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 colour 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; but on some inherent pleasantness in themselves, ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... highest ecstasy of soul, but the midge would see no beauty in those features because it had not the soul to enter into the soul of the man and understand the expression on his face. All the little shades and gradations and tones and lights in the features of the man would be quite meaningless to the midge because it would know nothing of the man's soul, of which the features and the changes and variations in them were the outward manifestation. The midge would know nothing of the reality of the man which ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... in viewing works of art, so in order to observe correctly the great works of God's natural providence, we must reduce them to their true perspective. It is the peculiarity of great movements of mind, that when so viewed they do not appear to be all shadow and formless, nor acts of meaningless impiety. They are products of intellectual antecedents, and perform their function in history. In nothing is the Divine image stamped on humanity, or the moral providence of God in the world, more visible, than ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... the long crystal 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, ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... little boredom. Some impatience. She began to find fault with the very things she had liked in him: his superneatness; his fondness for dashing suit patterns; his throaty tenor; his worship of her. And the flap. Oh, above all, that flap! That little, innocent, meaningless mannerism that made her tremble with nervousness. She hated it so that she could not trust herself to speak of it to him. That was the trouble. Had she spoken of it, laughingly or in earnest, before it became an obsession with her, that ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... and opinions of note in Russia, but utterly unknown in England—pictures which either delight or irritate the author's countrymen, according to the tendency of their social and political speculations, but which are as meaningless to the untutored English eye as a collection of "H.B."'s drawings would be to a Russian who had never studied English politics. Consequently neither of these stories is likely ever to be ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... tailed off into a meaningless drone that became merged with the creaking of the wheels, the plodding hoof-strokes of the horses, ...
— The Money Moon - A Romance • Jeffery Farnol
... colonization scheme. Anything that could unsettle the public opinion in the capital was to be avoided. Don Jose bowed to these arguments and tried to dismiss from his mind the gold-laced portent in boots, and with a sabre, made meaningless now at last, he hoped, in the ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... One might think they might be accounted superfluous. What is the good of tormenting a soul in Hell for ages, and then whirling it back to the body in order to rise again and receive a solemn public condemnation? Better leave it in the Inferno and save trouble, especially as the solemn trial is meaningless, seeing that a part of the sentence has already been undergone and that there is no hope that any portion of it will ever be remitted. Truly the tender mercies with which the theologians have credited the Almighty are ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... image of the Lord of Life, to him who, in the dusking twilight of the last age, shall crouch before a deity of stone or wood; and never one of that long lineage have learnt the wherefore of his being. The prophets, the martyrs, their noble anguish vain and meaningless; the wise whose thought strove to eternity, and was but an idle dream; the pure in heart whose life was a vision of the living God, the suffering and the mourners whose solace was in a world to come, the victims of injustice who cried to the Judge ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... once realize this we also realize how meaningless, or how indescribably less full of meaning, the poem would be without its second Part. And yet many, when they speak of Goethe's Faust, mean merely the first Part—or perhaps merely the little episode of Gretchen given in ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... force and genius. But how did Cromwell, Lincoln, Bismarck arise? What force produced them? Whence did they evolve? Yet without these three names, three great periods in the world's history would be meaningless. ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... attaches a meaningless remark to this proverb—"An answer of a tailor to him that calls him pricklouse." Is it not meant as a reply of one who may have been under the evil influence of another, and who, having shaken himself free of it, can say honestly that since he has done so he has been perfectly free, however much ...
— The Proverbs of Scotland • Alexander Hislop
... breast, beneath his doublet, and when the operation was concluded, presented—still in silence—the missive to M. de Baisemeaux. The latter, whose hands trembled in a manner to excite pity, turned a dull and meaningless gaze upon the letter. A last gleam of feeling played over his features, and he fell, as if ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... gradually. The meaningless flashings of preposterous color grew faint. The horrible uproar his auditory nerves reported, ceased. He and Jill had been at the mercy of the unseen operator of the terror beam. Perhaps the beam had grazed them, by accident. Or it could ...
— Operation Terror • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... different sort of mystery. I see, for instance, old Fawney stealing round the rooms of the Club, with glassy, meaningless eyes, and an endless greasy simper—he fawns on everybody he meets, and shakes hands with you, and blesses you, and betrays the most tender and astonishing interest in your welfare. You know him to be a quack and a rogue, and he knows you know ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray
... self-culture demands; but we are by nature indolent and frivolous, and only education can make us earnest and laborious. None but a cultivated mind can understand that if the whole human race could be turned loose, to eat and drink and play like thoughtless children, life would become meaningless; that a paradise in which work should not be necessary would become wearisome. The progress of the race is the result of effort, physical, religious, moral, and intellectual; and the advance of individuals is proportional ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... from 1767 to 1769, he published a Sermon; The Ninth Satire of Horace, a meaningless trifle of a hundred lines, swollen, by printing the original and notes, into a quarto; a volume of Fugitive Pieces; and the first canto of The Battle of Minden, a Poem in three Books, enriched with critical Notes by Two Friends, and ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 201, September 3, 1853 • Various
... proved a more 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 own expressed wish was granted: if he had "changed ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... God who colours the meaningless flowers, To that lawless infinite Poet who crowns the law with the crime; To the Weaver who covers the world with a garment of wonderful hours, And holds in His hand like threads the tales and the truths ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... believe that much innate potentiality remains undeveloped, even amongst the working classes, owing to the absence of opportunity for higher education, to the disadvantage of the nation. In consequence of these fundamental differences, the catchword 'equality of opportunity' is meaningless and mere claptrap in the absence of any equality to respond to such opportunity. What is wanted is not equality of opportunity, but education adapted to individual potentiality; and if the time and money now spent in the fruitless attempt to make silk-purses out ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... looked across at 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, ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... operations. One of them may pass perfunctory resolutions against the Philippine crime, but dares to say nothing about the treatment visited upon the negro. The other may say a few compassionate, but meaningless, words for the negro, but cannot denounce the oppression of the Filipinos. Both are fatally handicapped by their connections and committals. Both are, in fact, pro-slavery, although the one in power, because ...
— The Abolitionists - Together With Personal Memories Of The Struggle For Human Rights • John F. Hume
... however, that my faith continued to receive its most damaging blows; it was there that religion seemed a cold and meaningless term to me. Usually the commentaries, the narrow human reasoning and dissection took away from the beauty of the Bible and the Gospels, and deprived them of their grandly solemn and exquisite poetry. For a peculiar nature like mine it was very ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... it will acknowledge that a tutorship at Oriel was not the place for the author. The intense love of freedom, the deep and hearty sympathy with the foremost thought of the time, the humorous dealing with old formulas and conventionalisms grown meaningless, which breathe in every line of the 'Bothie,' show this clearly enough. He would tell in after-life, with much enjoyment, how the dons of the University, who, hearing that he had something in the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... disposition in India and Scotland. It is quite true that the art of India is delicate and refined. But it has one curious character distinguishing it from all other art of equal merit in design—it never represents a natural fact. It either forms its compositions out of meaningless fragments of colour and flowings of line; or if it represents any living creature, it represents that creature under some distorted and monstrous form. To all the facts and forms of nature it wilfully and resolutely opposes ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... was obliged, for reasons of political expediency and party exigency, to hold them in abeyance during the Presidential campaign of 1908. Jeffersonian democracy, therefore, seems now to be nothing more than a meaningless form of expression. ...
— The Facts of Reconstruction • John R. Lynch
... teaching will therefore appeal to interest through providing the fullest possible opportunity for the child to have an important share in the lesson. And this part must be something which to the child is worth doing, and not, for example, an oral memory drill on words meaningless to the pupil, nor "expression" work of a kind that lacks purpose and action. There are always real things to be done if the lesson is vital—personal experiences to be recounted, special assignments to be reported upon, maps to be drawn or remodeled, specimens ...
— How to Teach Religion - Principles and Methods • George Herbert Betts
... the meaningless refrain or "tol de rol" of a popular song in Richelieu's time. Van is for caravan, a Persian word, properly a company of merchants or ships travelling together, "also of late corruptly used with us for a kind of waggon to ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... substantially all the Republicans and forty-one Democrats, most of them from the industrial states of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Ohio. The Democratic tariff plank of 1884, as has been seen, was practically meaningless, but the election of Cleveland, and the choice of a Democratic House gave another opportunity for revision. Again Morrison attempted a reduction, and again he was defeated by Samuel J. Randall and the other ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... most of all was the new light that shone in her eyes. What could have caused this transformation? The weapon which she held in her hands,—"the fourteenth paragraph of the Secret Instructions." What cared she that to her these words were utterly meaningless? It sufficed her to know that there was such a paragraph; ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai
... early hour each morning a pink or green evening paper that shrieks with crimson headlines. Such has been his reading through all time, and this may have been an element in shaping his now inveterate hostility toward those who would engage him in meaningless talk. Even in accepting the gift of an excellent cigar he betrays only a bored condescension. There is no relenting of countenance, no genial relaxing of an ingrained suspicion toward all who approach him, no cordiality, in short, such as would lead you to believe that he might be ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... must have to give them up, and get new black ones, and that often at the very moment when they're just deprived of the aid of their only support and bread-winner. I wonder it doesn't occur to them that this is absolutely wrong, and that they oughtn't to prefer the meaningless fetich to their ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... yet very skillful in the use of language, I could get no satisfaction out of her answers, and could see that my questions seemed to distress her. At first she took little notice of what I said, regarding it no doubt as the meaningless prattle of a thoughtless child. My persistence, however, seemed to alarm her, and I suppose that she feared for my sanity. I soon desisted from asking anything further, and shut myself more and more within myself. ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... bed-time when children were tired. At other times she had the air of a stern prophetess, with a threat in every "tick, tick", and a hint of doom in the striking of every hour. As she stood now in her brown cloak darkened by the moonlight, and her round meaningless face whitened by it, she recalled to Terry a remark once made by Granny, "Many a life she has ticked away out of this house, and out of this world, has that old great-grandfather's ...
— Terry - Or, She ought to have been a Boy • Rosa Mulholland
... upon native tendencies to an elevated realization. Educationally this method is most full of promise. It is seen in kindergarten methods when a child is led from mere meaningless playing with toys to constructive manipulation of blocks, tools, etc. It is seen admirably in football where the pugnacious tendency of boys is capitalized on to build manliness in struggle and to develop a spirit of fair play. It is seen in the fostering of a girl's fondness for ...
— Principles of Teaching • Adam S. Bennion
... Many 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 or ...
— The Mountain Chant, A Navajo Ceremony • Washington Matthews
... as yet no spot reached on that splintered backbone where we might make a camp—to pass day after day in our tent on the glacier floor waiting for the bad weather to be done that we might essay it again; to watch the tantalizing and, as it seemed, meaningless fluctuations of the barometer for encouragement; to listen to the driving wind and the swirling snow, ...
— The Ascent of Denali (Mount McKinley) - A Narrative of the First Complete Ascent of the Highest - Peak in North America • Hudson Stuck
... of the Devil Dance of the great Buddhist monastery of Tuna, one of the fantastic Mystery Plays, the now almost meaningless functions into which the ideal faith preached by Gautama, the Buddha, the high-souled ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... Mortgages had to do with a department of the law unfamiliar to Tom, his wit, his intelligence, and his dexterity of hand having been exercised solely in upholding the dignity of the criminal branch, but once he had realized that a mortgage, so called, was no more than a meaningless banking term used to cloak the impulsive generosity of moneyed men, he availed himself of this discovery ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... brooked no transgression of its law. The daughters were educated on the same principles; they were kept in strict home seclusion; their mental development was of the lowest order, and did not extend beyond the narrowest limits of household life. And all this was crowned by an empty and meaningless etiquette, whose part it was to replace mind and culture, and which made life altogether, and especially that of a woman, ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... was no meaningless title. Bones had schemes which embraced every field of industrial, philanthropic, and social activity. He had schemes for building houses, and schemes for planting rose trees along all the railway tracks. He had schemes for building motor-cars, for founding labour colonies, ...
— Bones in London • Edgar Wallace
... sneering, scowling, threatening faces; Weeping, twisting, yelling, howling faces; Faces fixed in a contortion between a scream and a laugh, Meaningless faces. ...
— Japanese Prints • John Gould Fletcher
... during the winter, at all entertainments where, by virtue of his fame and rank, he would naturally be expected to be present. But he carried with him a certain melancholy and gravity, which contrasted strongly with the frivolous trivialities and meaningless smiles of our modern society. In the summer, he usually passed two months at the seashore, where Varhely frequently joined him; and upon the leafy terrace of the Prince's villa the two friends had long and confidential chats, as they ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Again, if they ever forget what they read, they'll be worried. Those who can forget—those with fresh eyes who have swept from their minds such facts as the exact month and day that their children were born, or the numbers on houses, or the names (the mere meaningless labels) of the people they meet,—will be urged to go live in sanitariums ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day
... But much listening to sermons had bred in the young man the inattentive heart, even though the ear was doing its duty. Roderick accepted sermons and church-going good-naturedly, as a necessary, respectable formality of life. That it must have a bearing on all life or be utterly meaningless he did not realise. His plans for life had nothing to do with church, and the divine call fell upon ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... moment she said her "mutch" was the only thing that gave her comfort, and the next she slackened the strings and let it back upon her neck, in a passion at it for making her too hot. Her talk was a wild, somewhat weird, farrago of utterly meaningless balderdash, mere inarticulate gabble, snatches of old Jacobite ballads and exaggerated phrases from the drama, to which she suited equally exaggerated action. She "babbled of green fields" and Highland glens; she prophesied "the drawing of the claymore," with ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... I'm not the incarnation of all the virtues you imagined me to be!" Olive sat down and played nervously with a penholder, jabbing meaningless lines and dots on to a loose sheet ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... an absolute weak-mindedness is to be observed. With what concrete pangs of acute mental distress would this person ever behold his immaculate progenitor taking part in a similar sit-round game with an assembly of worthy mandarins, the one asking questions of meaningless import, as "Why did they Hangkow?" and another replying in an equal strain of no consecutiveness, "In ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... a maze, to what almost seemed a wild farrago, save that the strange meaningless phrases were fraught with dim, mysterious significance. She caught glimmerings of profounds inexpressible and unthinkable that hinted connotations lawless and terrible. The woman's speech was a lava rush, scorching and searing; and Saxon's ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... bonfire. There had been quires of such verses, but she had destroyed all but a few leaves before she started for Littlebath. What were left, and were now read, were very sweet to her, and yet she knew that they were wrong and meaningless. What business had such a one as she to talk of the sphere's tune and the silvery moon, of bright stars shining and hearts repining? She would not for worlds have allowed any one to know what a fool she had been—either Mrs Tom, or John Ball, or Mr Maguire, or Miss Todd. She would have been covered ...
— Miss Mackenzie • Anthony Trollope
... the world as he has known it. Dissatisfaction and disillusion possess him; the negative marks of his nascent intuition of another life, for which he is intended but which he has not yet found. We see this initial phase very well in St. Benedict, disgusted by the meaningless life of Roman society; in St. Francis, abandoning his gay and successful social existence; in Richard Rolle, turning suddenly from scholarship to a hermit's life; in the restless misery of St. Catherine of Genoa; in Fox, desperately seeking "something that ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... his pen with the intention of putting his thoughts on paper, but not a line, not a word could he produce under the stress of these whirling sensations. Unable to construct a single sentence, he drew circles and meaningless figures on the white paper, scribbled insignificant words, only to cross them out immediately afterwards, and repeated again and again: "This ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
... 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, low, and ...
— Word Study and English Grammar - A Primer of Information about Words, Their Relations and Their Uses • Frederick W. Hamilton
... flourishes. All Oka Sayye knows how to do is to learn the lesson in his book perfectly, and he is 100 per cent. I have told you what you must do to add the plus, and you can do it if you are the boy I take you for. People have talked about the 'yellow peril' till it's got to be a meaningless phrase. Somebody must wake up to the realization that it's the deadliest peril that ever has menaced white civilization. Why shouldn't you have your hand in ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... that it is history; it is that that affects you, a haunting sense of the myriads of human lives that have blossomed, and withered, and perished here, repeating and repeating and repeating, century after century, and age after age, the barren and meaningless process; it is this sense that gives to this forlorn, uncomely land power to speak to the spirit and make friends with it; to, speak to it with a voice bitter with satire, but eloquent with melancholy. The deserts of Australia and the ice-barrens of Greenland ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... noises began. There was a reel and there were sound-speakers to keep the ship from sounding like a grave. The reel played and the speakers gave off minute creakings, and meaningless hums, and very tiny noises of every imaginable sort, all of which were just above ...
— This World Is Taboo • Murray Leinster
... comfortable wicker steamer chair, stretching its length in front of the south window. Presley was immensely fond of this room. It amused and interested him to maintain its air of rigorous simplicity and freshness. He abhorred cluttered bric-a-brac and meaningless objets d'art. Once in so often he submitted his room to a vigorous inspection; setting it to rights, removing everything but the essentials, the few ornaments which, in a way, were part of ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... seclusion of the Moor still holds, even half a world distant from the land of its origin. Yet his racial pseudo-courtesy leads the Mexican frequently to extend an invitation which only long experience teaches the stranger is a mere meaningless formality. On the train from Cordoba I spent considerable time in conversation with a well-to-do youth of Tehuantepec, during which I was formally invited at least a dozen times to visit him at his home. He failed to meet me at the rendezvous set, but was effusive when ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... The Seraph, singing his morning song. It was a tuneless drone, yet not unmusical. Always the first to open his eyes in the morning, he began his day with a sort of Saga of his exploits of the day before, usually meaningless to us but fraught with colour from his own peculiar sphere. At last he laughed outright—a Jovian laugh—at some remembered prank—and I rubbed my eyes and came to full consciousness. The sun was slanting through the shutters. Where, ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... 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
... laid down painfully reminds us that the poet and the historian have no such heritage in this land. We have done our best to crowd out all the beautiful significant names we found here, and to replace them by meaningless appellations. For the name of a thing is that which really has in it something of that to which it belongs, which describes and classifies it, and is its spoken representative; while the appellation is only a title conferred by act of Parliament ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... 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 ...
— Tea Leaves • Francis Leggett & Co.
... to recognize some Surya or Soma of Hindoo mythology, and the final touch, meaningless as applied to a European, reminds us that in India whiteness of skin has always been a sign of aristocratic birth, from the days when it originally distinguished the conquering Aryas from the indigenous race of ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... some German philosopher. At least it sounded like that. It was far above the little gray head he was trying to ignore and so weighty I feared for her mentality. But I did not know Dolly. She rose like a doughnut. Looking like a child who delights in the rhythm of meaningless sounds, she heard him through, then exclaimed with breathless delight, "Oh, ...
— The Lady and Sada San - A Sequel to The Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... ringlets, and the 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 ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... But with a Sutra the case is different. It comes from the same root as the word "sew," and means, indeed, a thread, suggesting, therefore, a close knit, consecutive chain of argument. Not only has each Sutra a definite place in the system, but further, taken out of this place, it will be almost meaningless, and will by no means be self-evident. So I have thought best to adhere to the original word. The Sutras of Patanjali are as closely knit together, as dependent on each other, as the propositions of Euclid, and can no more be taken out of their ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston
... a-tremble when the mounted photographs were handed to me. The first thing I did was to number the specimens, giving each blank space also its consecutive number. Certainly no one could imagine a more meaningless jumble of twigs, leaves, berries, and bugs. How could I read ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... ruffians paraded the streets, robbing and murdering as they pleased; the soldiers quarrelled among themselves; the nobles fought in the public places, unsheathing their swords even in the Parliament House. Thoroughly wearied of this meaningless strife, I longed for a strong man, such as our present most gracious King has proved, who should whip these snarling ...
— My Sword's My Fortune - A Story of Old France • Herbert Hayens
... recalling old ideas and feelings that are related to those to be presented in the selection to be studied. He must be placed in a proper intellectual attitude to interpret the ideas and in a proper emotional attitude to appreciate the feelings. Neglect of the former may make the selection wholly meaningless to the pupil; neglect of the latter may result in entire indifference toward it. A proper intellectual attitude is necessary in any lesson, but in a lesson in grammar or arithmetic the emotional attitude may be almost ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Literature • Ontario Ministry of Education
... category from a long line of chefs, but evidently he knew precious little about his field. Joe might have suspected. He himself had been born into Clothing Category, Sub-division Shoes, Branch Repair—Cobbler—a meaningless trade since shoes were no longer repaired but discarded upon showing signs of wear. In an economy of complete abundance, there is little reason for repair of basic commodities. It was high time the government investigated category assignment and reshuffled ...
— Mercenary • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... instead of the normal white and pink. They were dressed in dark short tunics, and kept talking to each other in a tongue quite unintelligible to Norman and Hackett. They came closer, flocking curiously around the two men, with a babel of voices quite meaningless to the two. Then one of the men uttered ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... transformations—in religion, philology, geology, biology. Closely connected with the predominance of the historical in Hegel's philosophy is its explicit critique of individualism and particularism. According to his doctrine, the individual as individual is meaningless. The particular—independent and unrelated—is an abstraction. The isolation of anything results in contradiction. It is only the whole that animates and gives meaning to the individual and the particular. This idea of subordinating the individual to universal ends, as embodied particularly in ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... and took 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 with the ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... vague and meaningless words, written to satisfy solicitation, and without a thought of their consequences: they were urgent recommendations and precise injunctions, the most proper for securing success to the protected in the name of the protector. Accordingly St. Boniface wrote, soon after, from the heart of Germany, ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... silly how the little word tore its way into her very heart; she had to bite her lips to keep herself from crying out. She did not realize that the word was meaningless to him. ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... mind and body, so that the will, which is always the expression of the link between these two, is, for the time, dissolved. The body rests, but the unfettered mind enters upon a "will-less state of pure seeing," where dreams no longer remain the meaningless fantasies of blind sleep, but become luminous with idea and sequence. With the body thus left behind, the intellect rises to the zenith of perception, where the blue veil of earthly knowledge is ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... more to the same effect, and of course Froude must have been in Stephens's mind. But the reputation of a great historian is not to be taken away by hints. It may suit Freeman's admirers to seek refuge in meaningless generalities. Those who are grateful for Froude's services to England, and to literature, have no interest in concealment. Froude never "pretended to more knowledge than he really had." So far from "enjoying a reputation for learning which was undeserved," he ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... men come out of brutishness To spell the letters of the sky and read A reflex upon earth else meaningless. With thee, O fount of the Untimed! to lead, Drink they of thee, thee eyeing, they unaged Shall on through ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... resurrection naturally lost its vital significance, and it has practically held no place in the great systems of philosophy elaborated by the Christian thinkers in modern times." And, yet, the Church continues to repeat the now meaningless words, "I believe in the Resurrection of the Body." And while practically no one now believes it, still the recital of the words, and the statement of one's belief in them, forms a necessary requisite for admission into the Christian ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... are just meaningless sounds to me. If that is what makes this planet tick I'm beginning to see why the rest of the staff ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison
... while our vessel was lying in the canal, I was visited by an evil dream, but dreams are empty and meaningless, and I hope that no more of my disagreeable fancies will be realized than that you at home, may experience a little anxiety and solicitude concerning the ...
— The Home in the Valley • Emilie F. Carlen
... Flutes staidly. Moaning Continuously as seas Or forests before storm, And, gathering moment, Articulated by her woe, begins With second-sighted eloquence To wail through me, Nigh as unheeded, As though it still had been Meaningless wind. ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... so riveted upon the extraordinary alteration in her appearance, that her words fell on his ear, as empty, as meaningless, as the echoes heard in dreams, and when she ceased speaking, he looked perplexed, ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... rather vexed at it for giving so many idiots an excuse for ranting and absurd sentimentality. Now just look at all these people on the beach. In reality they are bored to extinction, and enjoy the Boulevards infinitely more than this expanse of water, which is quite meaningless to them. And yet you have only to mention the word—the sea—and they will instantly turn up their eyes and start off repeating the lesson they have learned by rote about their rapture and enthusiasm, just like a musical box which grinds out ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... was this scrutiny, so meaningless and yet so full of a meaning which he could not grasp, that Leonard shrank beneath it. He spoke to his brother, but no answer came,—only the great hollow eyes read on in that book which was printed upon his ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... 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 ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... This difficult passage may be clarified by reading ethryethe strength, copious power, in place of the meaningless ethridda third, in the MS., and at the same time making rymme the object of haefde ...
— Genesis A - Translated from the Old English • Anonymous
... the coachman that Mr. John was off to Promontor and did not mean to return again in a hurry, so he resolved to take his measures accordingly. He rushed forward to open the carriage door, helped Mr. John to get into the coach, wished him a most pleasant journey, no end of enjoyment and other meaningless things, all of which made much the same agreeable impression upon Mr. John as if an ant had crept into his boot and he could not kill it because he was in company. Only when the carriage door was shut to and he saw Margari's face no more did he ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... finished and ready to be handed in on the morrow. Steve looked over at him enviously and sighed. He hadn't an idea in his head for that composition! After a while, when he had spoiled two good sheets of paper with meaningless scrawls, he pushed back his chair. There was just one course open. He would go down and tell Mr. Daley that he couldn't do it! After all, "Horace" was a pretty reasonable sort of chap and would probably ...
— Left End Edwards • Ralph Henry Barbour
... West Virginia, I induced my mother to get hold of a book for me. How or where she got it I do not know, but in some way she procured an old copy of Webster's "blue-back" spelling-book, which contained the alphabet, followed by such meaningless words as "ab," "ba," "ca," "da." I began at once to devour this book, and I think that it was the first one I ever had in my hands. I had learned from somebody that the way to begin to read was to learn the alphabet, so I tried ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... 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
... defrauded, and I meant to have my turn at last: my joy and pleasure. It seemed just and right to me that I should taste and revel in all that I had been deprived of. I had even been deprived of the longing, had not even had the glory of conquest. I had been such a meaningless creature, I thought I could afford even to be selfish. I shrank from being different—I had been forced to in the past—but I meant to make up for lost time and take my place ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... be avoided is monotony in colour. Who can not recall barren rooms, without a spark of attraction despite priceless treasures, dispersed in a meaningless way? That sort of setting puts a blight on any gathering. "Well," you will ask, "given the task of converting such a sterile stretch of monotony into a blooming joy, how should one begin?" It is quite simple. Picture to yourself how the room ...
— The Art of Interior Decoration • Grace Wood
... red-haired daughter thrust upon him. It was rather hard, and Tom's face was very gloomy and dark for the remainder of the evening, while they sat upon the piazza and laughed, and talked, and said the little nothings so pleasant to the young and so meaningless to the old ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... domain. Its wealth of attractions were as yet unknown to the hunter, the fisherman and the fur-trader. Rude as he was the red man could feel the charms of the wilderness in which he dwelt. The voice of nature was not meaningless to one who knew her haunts so well. The dark recesses of the forest, the sunny glades of the open woodland, the mossy dells, the sparkling streams and roaring mountain torrents, the quiet lakes, the noble river flowing onward to ...
— Glimpses of the Past - History of the River St. John, A.D. 1604-1784 • W. O. Raymond
... not be forgotten, while condemning the meaningless insipidity of Wyatt's work, that it was enthusiastically approved in his own day, and that the public generally were as much ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Hereford, A Description - Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • A. Hugh Fisher
... Sometimes the sufferer knows what he wants to say, but cannot utter the word; at other times he will say the wrong thing, knowing that he is doing so, but utterly unable to prevent it; it also shows several other phases where the sentences become disjointed, or meaningless, not due to lack ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Tribesmen • Roger Finlay
... appointed to 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 and trivial. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... horrible even—anything, if they were unusual, were such as to set the man who was involved in them apart from his fellows. The foreign element in him woke up, called, perhaps, from repose by the unusually languid air, and London seemed meaningless to him, a city where a man of his type could neither dream, nor act, with all the languor, or all the energy, that was within him. And he imagined, as sometimes clever children do, a distant country where all romances unwind their shining coils, ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens |
