nothingnessn.

a1631 J. Donne Nocturnall in Poems (1654) 36 His art did expresse A quintessence even from nothingnesse.

1647 H. More Philos. Poems 247 Infernall Night..lies next unto old Nothingnesse.

1691 R. Baxter Glorious Kingdom of Christ ii. 30 Here we have Anihilation and Nothingness in themselves.

1792 T. Holcroft Road to Ruin iv. 75 Round let the great globe whirl; and whirl it will, though I should happen to slide from its surface into infinite nothingness.

1834 T. Carlyle Sartor Resartus i. i. 2/1 The immeasurable circumambient realm of Nothingness and Night!

1866 W. R. Alger Solitudes Nature & Man iv. 251 He sees man suspended between the two abysses of infinity and nothingness.

1884 19th Cent. Mar. 500 Its sole dogma is the infinity of Nothingness.

1915 V. Woolf Voy. Out xxv. 418 The soft wind passed through the branches of the trees, seeming to encircle him with peace and security, with dark and nothingness.

1956 S. Beckett Waiting for Godot ii. 81 In an instant all will vanish and we'll be alone again, in the midst of nothingness.

1992 Mod. Painters Spring 98/3 Giacometti's celebrated dream in which ‘there was no relation between objects: they were separated by measureless chasms of nothingness’.

1766 H. Brooke Fool of Quality II. viii. 64 Even the Cherubim and Seraphim, the mightiest and most exalted of the Works of Omnipotence, would be reduced to a State of Nothingness by an Independence on their Creator.

1812 W. Irving Hist. N.Y. (ed. 2) II. vii. x. 242 Each has returned to its primeval nothingness.

1875 A. Maclaren Serm. 2nd Ser. i. 18 It must..be done by Faith, whose rod disenchants them into their native nothingness, and then it is blessed.

1894 A. Jessopp Random Roaming i. 3 How beautiful plans do fade into nothingness.

1926 H. W. Fowler Dict. Mod. Eng. Usage 697/1 Vogue-words. Every now & then a word emerges from obscurity, or even from nothingness or a merely potential & not actual existence, into sudden popularity.

1955 R. S. Thomas Song at Year's Turning 39 December shadows Dwindled to nothingness in the spring meadows.

1991 G. Ehrlich Islands, Universe, Home vi. 74 Today yellow is combed all through the trees, and the heart-shaped cottonwood leaves spin downward to nothingness.

1813 Ld. Byron Giaour (new ed.) 4 The first dark day of nothingness.

1816 Ld. Byron Let. 30 Sept. (1976) V. 108 A sort of gray giddiness first—then nothingness.

1819 P. B. Shelley Rosalind & Helen 23 They themselves were weaned each one..even from the thirst Of death, and nothingness, and rest.

1843 E. A. Poe Pit & Pendulum in Gift 135 Amid earnest struggles to regather some token of the state of seeming nothingness into which my soul had lapsed, there have been moments when I have dreamed of success.

a1928 D. H. Lawrence Coll. Poems (1928) 111 How we hate one another to-night, hate, she and I to numbness and nothingness; I dead, she refusing to die.

1977 C. G. Wolff Feast of Words (1978) ii. 175 There is..a sensuous attraction in the notion of annihilation—of comforting nothingness.

1989 J. Trollope Village Affair xii. 184 The most desirable state was nothingness, just not to be.

1946 Time 28 Jan. 28/3 Existentialism..has its bible, the abstruse 700-page L'Etre et le Néant (Being and Nothingness), which Philosopher Sartre published in 1943.

1946 Time 28 Jan. 29/2 Heidegger's ultimately cynical subjectivism rather than the Danish prophet's [sc. Kierkegaard] Christian profundity determined Sartre's concept of man's responsibility: ‘Man is free to act, but he must act to be free. If he fails to choose a social or political line of action, he is not a Being; he is Nothingness.’

1980 W. L. Reese Dict. Philos. & Relig. 509/2 Our disappointed expectations (‘Pierre is not in the café’) introduce a sense of ‘nothingness’ into our experience.

1646 H. Lawrence Of Communion & Warre with Angels 150 By the foolishnesse, that is, by the Nothingnesse, of Preaching hee saves them that beleeve.

1693 G. Firmin Πανουργια i. 10 Why should a Man look after anothers Righteousness, till he see the nothingness of his own?

1724 London Gaz. No. 6240/3 Sensible..of the Nothingness of this World and the Vanity of its Grandeurs.

1771 T. Smollett Humphry Clinker II. 82 A sarment upon the nothingness of good works..was preached in the Tabernacle.

1823 Ld. Byron Don Juan: Canto VII vi. 68 Must I restrain me, through the fear of strife, From holding up the Nothingness of life?

1845 G. H. Lewes Biogr. Hist. Philos. I. 78 Which first called men's attention to the nothingness of knowledge.

1884 W. S. Lilly in Contemp. Rev. Feb. 257 This self-renunciation..founded itself upon the vanity and nothingness of what was given up.

1937 W. Lewis Revenge for Love ii. ii. 87 He was back in the noisy nothingness of his whoopee days.

1995 Amer. Brewer Spring 12/2 Maybe it was something reactive to the nothingness of the pale American beers that had ruled for so long.

1652 Mercurius Britannicus No. 2. 18 He is a start mad-man that dares hope for or expect any thing left, but the guts and garbage of nonsensical Nothingness.

1743 H. Walpole Lett. (1903) I. 376 My letters are now at their ne plus ultra of nothingness.

1800 S. T. Coleridge tr. F. Schiller Piccolomini i. iv. 25 Mere bustling nothingness, where the soul is not.

1863 A. W. Kinglake Invasion of Crimea I. xxiii. 403 The political conversation between the booted Czar and the men of peace was sheer nothingness.

1880 ‘Ouida’ Moths II. 384 What a confession of internal nothingness.

1917 E. R. Burroughs Princess of Mars xxi. 236 The like of them on Earth dwindled into pale, gray, characterless nothingness by comparison.

1957 F. Hoyle Black Cloud iv. 85 I am concerned with facts not with motives, suspicions, and airy-fairy nothingness.

1993 Empire Aug. 109/1 A martial artist so inept at acting that he can't even play himself, and an overall air of chewing-gummy nothingness.