There are some that detest them as a kind of sacrilege and count it the height of impiety to speak so irreverently of such hidden things, rather to be adored than explicated; to dispute of them with such profane and heathenish niceties; to define them so arrogantly and pollute the majesty of divinity with such pithless and sordid terms and opinions. ❋ C. 1466-1536 (1958)
Then the goddess, strange and ominous to see, fashions into the likeness of Aeneas a thin and pithless shade of hollow mist, decks it with Dardanian weapons, and gives it the mimicry of shield and divine helmet plume, gives unsubstantial [640-673] words and senseless utterance, and the mould and motion of his tread: like shapes rumoured to flit when death is past, or dreams that delude the slumbering senses. ❋ 70 BC-19 BC Virgil (N/A)
"I am not," says Bolli, "for it seems to me a feeble, pithless thing." ❋ W. P. Ker (N/A)
The grass that gets no other light grows slim and pithless, bearing no seed-knot on its slender top. ❋ William Arnot (N/A)
The Lords amended it to death, and sent it back to the Commons -- the poor and pithless shadow of its former self. ❋ Various (N/A)
For over those the sun has had power since their birth, consuming their marrows and evaporating their blood so that they became pithless things that have to fly indoors for half the day and leave the ❋ Rebecca West (1937)
That was a tame and pithless performance, and if Jasper was in it at all he was evidently resting his better forces for the bigger battle at three o'clock in the impending afternoon. ❋ William Eldridge (1908)
An 'he is but a fusionless carlie, O. [pithless old fellow] ❋ William Allan Neilson (1907)
It was her fault that he was such a poor creature; "a pithless creature; I've made you so!" she said. ❋ Margaret Wade Campbell Deland (1901)
When their first pithless tenderness is past, we strip them and aim at hardening them to the temperature of the various seasons, till heat does not incommode nor frost paralyse them. ❋ Of Samosata Lucian (1895)
Away in the background some of them had familiars or casual prompters to whose counsels they were wont to listen, but many of the adjoints who moved in the limelight of the world-stage were gritless and pithless. ❋ Emile Joseph Dillon (1894)
He loses himself in vague generalities and pithless abstractions. ❋ Emile Joseph Dillon (1894)
'As for me,' said Eudemus, 'I was sent for in the gloaming by Damasias, the athlete many-victoried of yore, now pithless from age; you know him in bronze in the market. ❋ Of Samosata Lucian (1894)
He was a pithless automaton, in whom mind and emotions had long since become inert, and only enough sensibility was left to enable him to feel dimly miserable. ❋ Julian Hawthorne (1890)
The bulk of the Dissenters are, I fancy, indifferent to any junction with the Church of England, and would just as soon have no religious teaching as what they call a 'pithless jelly-fish' religious teaching. ❋ Richard Ernest Nowell Twopeny (1886)
By far the greater number of them, however, seem now pithless and pointless, whatever they may have been considered in ancient days, when, perhaps, folk found food for mirth in things which utterly fail to tickle our "sense of humour" in these double-distilled days. ❋ William Alexander Clouston (1869)
The hand that passively held the mockery of the worthless, pithless reed, therefore rules the princes of the earth with the rod of iron. ❋ Alexander Maclaren (1868)
All thoughts of fear were banished in an instant, as soon as we discovered that we had flesh and blood to deal with instead of grave-clothes and pithless bones. ❋ William Henry Thomes (1859)
{157} Now if there be one plant more than another in which the pith is defined, it is the common Rush; while the nobler families of true herbs derive their principal character from being pithless altogether! ❋ John Ruskin (1859)
In his consequential verdancy, his aristocratic boobyism, and his lack-brain originality, this pithless hereditary squireling is quite inimitable and irresistible; -- a tall though slender specimen of most effective imbecility, whose manners and character must needs all be from within, because he lacks force of nature to shape or dress himself by any model. ❋ Henry Norman Hudson (1850)
