Empty

Famous quotes containing the word empty:

    It is a great mistake to suppose that clever, imaginative children ... should content themselves with the empty nonsense which is so often set before them under the name of Children’s Tales. They want something much better; and it is surprising how much they see and appreciate which escapes a good, honest, well- informed papa.
    —E.T.A.W. (Ernst Theodor Amadeus Wilhelm)

    When a poor disconsolated drooping creature is terrified from all enjoyment,—prays without ceasing ‘till his imagination is heated,—fasts and mortifies and mopes, till his body is in as bad a plight as his mind; is it a wonder, that the mechanical disturbances ... of an empty belly, interpreted by an empty head, should be mistook for [the] workings [of God].
    Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)

    The skylines lit up at dead of night, the air- conditioning systems cooling empty hotels in the desert and artificial light in the middle of the day all have something both demented and admirable about them. The mindless luxury of a rich civilization, and yet of a civilization perhaps as scared to see the lights go out as was the hunter in his primitive night.
    Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)